The way you're making me feel: the personal and the pandemic

I was going to write a post on what anti-vaxxers are doing during COVID-19, but mostly they are just posting affiliate links to super-strong Vitamin C on Amazon, and/or linking to their own webstore that sells, you guessed it, super-strong Vitamin C. Extra Vitamin C is a total scam by the way. They also view the latest measures to curb the growth of COVID-19 as a way to introduce mandatory vaccination. They’re advocating the use of Plaquenil and zinc as a way to treat the virus, as is the President. Some people have died as a result. As to be expected there’s also a lot of general denial about the seriousness of COVID-19.

So that was my starting point, and I found that in their denial anti-vaccination groups are sitting alongside conspiracy theories that attempt to undercut the seriousness of this crisis

Most recently a viral video of a quiet Brooklyn Hospital purported to show that the pandemic has been exaggerated by public health authorities. This resulted in the #FilmYourHospital hashtag where Twitter users were encouraged to go and film their local hospitals in an attempt to debunk the idea that COVID-19 is a public health emergency. There are thousands of replies to the original tweets including some with video and photos that appear to show empty hospitals. Prominent conservative pundits and have helped propel the videos to their followers.

One day later a video from the same Brooklyn hospital shows bodies being loaded onto an eighteen-wheeler truck for transport. Reporters for NBC news have confirmed that this video is genuine.

Although we’re not yet filming our hospitals in Australia, we are spreading panic about busloads of city folk raiding regional supermarkets for supplies. I’ve heard it from friends, I’ve seen it on the accounts of prominent Australian journalists, each retweeted hundreds of times.

It makes its way through Facebook groups, taking on racist tones, suddenly the busloads of phantom shopper are Chinese.

In the age of ubiquitous smartphones, there is not one photo or video of these busloads raiding supermarkets.

This urban (or regional) legend has been thoroughly debunked. The Guardian and Osman Faruqui did the hard yards, calling regional supermarkets and coach companies to check the veracity of the story.

I live in regional Victoria, earlier in March when Australia was in the grip of panic buying I liked, or perhaps I retweeted on of these claims.

It felt true, my town is small and the shelves were bare, it felt improbable that everyone around me had brought out the supermarkets.

We operate in information-saturated environments every day, and right now this is particularly pronounced. A day on Twitter can feel like a week.

Events move quickly on Twitter, exploding out of nowhere and subsiding just as quickly as the next event moves in. Days later, checking on Facebook, screenshots are shared there too. It feels like old news, it feels like last month, last year, but it has only been 24 hours.

Speed is not just about the tempo at which things happens but also the scale and spread of them. As a consequence, issues like the moderation of content on social platforms become increasingly complex. This is true not just for clearly objections violations of policy, but for the grey areas of misinformation as well and what type of information is allowed to circulate.

The volume of content is vast and continues to grow (quickly) on a daily basis. Speed is an important part of how information flows and circulates online.

So, we have an environment where a lot of information comes at us very fast, and we have no real way of sorting that information except on the basis of our own experience. In this environment we retreat almost instinctively to highly personalised ways of understanding the world, we trust what we can see or what we know others have seen, we trust our own experience of the world, we trust how we feel, or how something makes us feel.

We trust the personal more than the abstract. This alters the social context as individual ways of knowing about the world are presented as just as valid as expert ways of knowing, or in some instances more valid, as accessing the ‘truth’ behind the coverup.

We’ve been taught, through the project of neoliberal governance to rely only on ourselves, so it is perhaps no surprise that we retreat to our own logics of knowing when the world around us seems too fast, too loud and too slippery to grasp.

But defaulting to our experience makes us unruly (collectively, ironically). We buy more when we are told to stop, we go out when we should stay home, we tell our friends that hordes of people are raiding regional supermarkets, and sometimes we deny the virus exists at all.

All this speed, all these feelings create rich and rapidly changing affective environments, particularly online, that rise and fall like waves. Our individual reckonings about what to share, about what feels true, begin to move beyond us. They become overwhelming and contagious but can also vanish in an instant.

How can we be in such a context? I could tell you to log off, to consume less? But as we self-isolate the same technologies that overwhelm us are also the ones that bring us comfort and connection.

And here we remain, suspended between the personal and the collective, how it feels and how it is.