Media and Epidemics: Technologies of Science Communication and Public Health

As the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has made increasingly clear, outbreaks of infectious diseases represent a veritable 'stress test' for a country's underlying socio-economic and political structures. This includes its ability to harness technologies and infrastructures of communication to overcome such public health crises, for example by implementing population surveillance measures, communicating with broader publics, coordinating epidemic responses or devising strategies of preparedness against future outbreaks (Budd et al. 2020). As medical and social phenomena, epidemics tend to be highly mediatized events, although the limits and local inflections of that mediatization are yet to be subjected to sustained critical attention in both historical and contemporary settings. Furthermore, they provide significant opportunities to reflect on the ways in which technology and society co-constitute each other. By becoming testing grounds for various technologies of epidemic management, epidemics accelerate innovation, adaptation and change, but also bring to the fore inequalities of access, legal, ethical and privacy dilemmas, questions of public trust, effective communication of science and (mis)information overload. The recent resurgence of the term 'infodemic' is a stark reminder that epidemics are not only corporeal experiences, but also events of intense meaning making (Bashford and Hooker 2001), in the course of which social actors scramble to cope with myriad anxieties and uncertainties.

Our concern in this project is to historicize contemporary digital transformations in the field of public health, but also to advance academic and public conversations about the actual meaning of the 'Digital Age,' both as a heuristic device and lived reality. By probing the interconnected development of medicine, media and technology, we hope to draw attention to a neglected field of historical and cultural inquiry and answer a question of significant contemporary relevance: How digital is the Digital Age? A long-term, trans-regional and trans-disciplinary perspective on the technological aspects of epidemic management can help us to understand how media and technology shape the making and communication of knowledge about public health, but also to probe the extent to which electronic dematerialization has been relevant to managing such outbreaks in the first place.

Bridging the past and present of digital technologies, the project's thematic scope overlaps with both strands of the CHANSE call, 'Cultural transformations in the digital age?' and 'Digitalisation and social transformation'. In particular, we aim to understand contemporary digital transformations in the field of public health by locating them within a longer, culturally specific history of innovation and social change. We pay attention to the social inequalities, exclusions and ethical dilemmas that have framed technology use in public health since the mid-20th century as well as the intersections between political power, the mediatization of epidemics and the public communication of science. The project aims to intervene in current debates about the Digital Age by conceptualizing media and technologies of communication both as objects of historical and cultural inquiry and instruments of learning about past epidemics. Drawing on the repertoire of the humanities and the performing arts, it makes use of neglected historical archives and technologies old and new to develop educational tools that bring historical awareness to contemporary challenges around technology, media and public health, and promote media literacy more generally.