Media and Epidemics: Technologies of Science Communication and Public Health

随着目前的新冠肺炎疫情日益明显，传染病的暴发是对一个国家潜在的社会经济和政治结构的一次名副其实的压力测试。这包括其利用通信技术和基础设施克服此类公共卫生危机的能力，例如通过实施人口监测措施、与更广泛的公众沟通、协调流行病应对或制定防范未来暴发的战略(Budd等人)。2020)。作为医学和社会现象，流行病往往是高度调解化的事件，尽管这种调解化的局限性和局部影响在历史和当代背景下都尚未受到持续的批判性关注。此外，它们还提供了思考技术和社会共同构成彼此的方式的重要机会。通过成为各种流行病管理技术的试验场，流行病加快了创新、适应和变革，但也突出了获取机会的不平等、法律、伦理和隐私困境、公众信任问题、科学的有效传播和(Mis)信息过载。最近“信息人”一词的重新流行提醒人们，流行病不仅是肉体上的体验，而且是具有强烈意义的事件(Bashford And Hooker 2001)，在这个过程中，社会参与者争先恐后地应对无数的焦虑和不确定性。我们在这个项目中关注的是将公共卫生领域的当代数字变革载入史册，并推动学术和公共对话，讨论“数字时代”的实际意义，无论是作为一种启发式手段还是作为现实生活。通过探讨医学、媒体和技术的相互联系的发展，我们希望引起人们对被忽视的历史和文化研究领域的关注，并回答一个具有重大当代意义的问题：数字时代是如何数字化的？从长期、跨地区和跨学科的角度看待疫情管理的技术方面，可以帮助我们理解媒体和技术如何塑造公共卫生知识的创造和传播，也有助于我们探索电子非物质化在多大程度上与控制此类疫情有关。跨越数字技术的过去和现在，该项目的主题范围与Chanse呼吁的两个方面--‘数字时代的文化转型？’--重叠。以及“数字化和社会转型”。特别是，我们的目标是了解公共卫生领域的当代数字转型，方法是将它们置于更长的、特定于文化的创新和社会变革历史中。我们关注自20世纪中叶以来在公共卫生中使用技术的社会不平等、排斥和伦理困境，以及政治权力、流行病的调解和科学的公共传播之间的交叉。该项目旨在通过将传播媒体和技术概念化，既作为历史和文化调查的对象，又作为了解过去流行病的工具，介入目前关于数字时代的辩论。它利用人文和表演艺术的剧目，利用被忽视的历史档案和新旧技术，开发教育工具，将历史意识带入围绕技术、媒体和公共卫生的当代挑战，并更广泛地促进媒体扫盲。

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.