撰写Text/Liu Hailong (School of Journalism, China Renmin University)
Among the words collocated with Covid-19, "communication" is often mentioned. However, at present, "virus transmission" is basically an epidemiological research topic, and communication seems not to care about it. So, what is the difference between the "spread" of the virus and the "spread" mentioned in communication science? Are they one concept or two concepts?
Tracing back to the history of thought, in fact, "communication", "traffic", "diffusion" and even "imitation" all have similar sources, that is, the sharing and infiltration of ideas, materials and energy in time and space. The original meaning of Communication includes two aspects: transportation and concept dissemination. Harold Innis, a Canadian economic historian, first realized the importance of media by studying fur trade and transportation, and then put forward the theory that media bias affects the distribution of knowledge and power. His view inspired Marshall McLuhan to turn from cultural criticism to media studies. It can be seen that in the period when communication research has not been institutionalized, the concept of communication is much broader than today.
Deviation of communication science
[Plus] harold Inis/with
He Daokuan/Translation
Communication University of China Press, 2015-08.
But in the 1940s, with the establishment of communication in the United States, the concept of communication became narrower. At that time, communication was a new frontier discipline, and Wilbur Schramm, who taught writing, integrated scattered studies on communication in sociology, politics and psychology to construct communication. He realized that it was difficult to gain discipline legitimacy by piecing together sporadic knowledge in other fields, so he used the "information theory" which was in the limelight at that time as concrete, and glued these "knowledge bricks" from other disciplines with different purposes together to build a small building of "communication science". While successfully integrating different disciplines, this practice also narrows the extension of the concept of "communication" in communication, excluding behaviors that do not belong to information exchange and sharing.
Shi Lamu’s emphasis on ideas and information and neglect of material things is not without doubt. For example, McLuhan once satirized that when Shi Lamu studied the influence of television, he only paid attention to the effect of information, ignoring the influence of the material medium itself, and he was seeking fish from the wood. He himself wrote in Understanding Media: On the Extension of Man (Understanding Media: The Extensions of ManIn the second part of the book, 26 kinds of media are discussed. Among them, roads, clothes, houses, money, clocks, cars, typewriters and weapons are not simply media that transmit information, but they have changed the environment, grammar and scale of human behavior just like information media. The school of communication political economics did not accept this dichotomy between material and information, but transplanted Marx’s analysis of material goods into the process of production, circulation and consumption of information goods, and unified them with the concept of labor.
Understanding media: on the extension of human beings
[Plus] marshall mcluhan/with
He Daokuan/Translation
The Commercial Press, October 2000.
In today’s new media technology, the dichotomy between information and matter established by Shi Lamu is in jeopardy. Social platforms, shopping platforms, short video platforms, taxi platforms, etc. are all composed of codes, which can be regarded as traditional information categories; But on the other hand, they have the same materiality as infrastructure such as roads, buildings, hydropower and telecommunications. They have service functions, production rules and data like pipelines or air routes, but they do not produce content for people’s direct consumption. They are both information and material-digital objects. In addition, it is difficult to simply divide the firmware program that drives the hardware in electronic products into the binary category of matter or information.
If we admit that information and matter are not completely different, then the "spread" of information and the "spread" of virus can be regarded as the same category. French scholar Régis Debray called this more general concept "transmission", that is, the process before the decoding of information meaning, which is a simple transportation process with the help of a certain material carrier. German media scholar Sybille Kr?mer compared this process to a "messenger". The messenger does not interfere with the object of transmission, nor does it participate in encoding and decoding, but only plays the role of "porter". Therefore, in such a more general category of "communication", we can discuss the communication of virus from the perspective of communication. However, it should be noted that this is different from the spread of viruses discussed in epidemiology, which pursues the causal explanation of natural science, and the "virus communication" here is only an explanatory framework, with the purpose of discussing what new enlightenment it will bring to our understanding of the cultural significance of viruses and general communication after considering the spread of viruses and other material things in a more general sense.
If the spread of virus can be compared with the spread of information, what is the difference between them? Can the paradigm originally used to explain the spread of information be used to analyze viruses?
Let’s discuss the simplest communication from a microscopic point of view. It is the most basic process of virus transmission from one host to another. Similarly, the interpersonal communication of information from one person to another is the basis of information communication. The spread of information should be based on mutual understanding between the sender and the receiver, which is considered to be the condition for the spread to occur. If misunderstanding occurs, it will lead to disharmony between communication and its follow-up behavior. According to Norbert Wiener, the founder of Cybernetics, if we want to ensure order, we should adjust it through feedback until both sides reach an agreement. However, the successful spread of the virus is based on the misreading of the virus by the immune system. The virus must enter the host body in a way that is imperceptible to human beings, and only when the immune system cannot recognize (misunderstand) it can successfully enter the cell membrane and successfully replicate. Or we can understand it this way-the consistency of the two sides pursued by virus transmission is not meaningful, but material.
Image from Unsplash @CDC
The purpose of information dissemination is to establish a certain relationship through the understanding of meaning, while the purpose of virus dissemination is only to copy itself. Interpersonal relationship is reciprocal, but the relationship between virus and host is one-way exploitation. It uses the energy and material of host to copy itself, turn it into its own processing factory and spread it outward. Moreover, because it is one-way exploitation, the spread of the virus is also characterized by violent conquest.
Finally, the premise of information dissemination is to recognize the subjectivity of the other party, or to recognize the other and accept differences. Therefore, communication does not regard each other as a tool to pursue simple identity, but the relationship between "I" and "you" as Martin Buber said, accepting the opacity between people. The spread of the virus is to completely eliminate the opacity between "I" and "you", completely deny the otherness, turn the host into a body that infects and spreads the same virus, and finally become a tool for the virus to spread itself.
In addition to involving both parties, the spread of the virus will also show exponential growth in the group. The basic reproductive number (R0) in epidemiology represents the spread speed of virus network-this no longer belongs to the category of interpersonal communication, but becomes "mass communication". However, the "mass communication" here is very different from the mass communication of information we are familiar with. The mass communication of information is often based on a specific media, such as newspapers and television, and its communication center is fixed, that is, a transmission network must be established before information can reach everyone along the tree-like network hierarchy. The spread of the virus is more like the information dissemination mode on social media, based on the decentralized interpersonal network extension. The difference is that the virus transmission network is forced by violence, not based on the free choice of the recipients. At the same time, the virus transmission network is dynamically constructed with actions, rather than a static network laid in advance.
Image from Unsplash @Sam McGhee
This is in line with the network form described by French scholar latour in his Actor-Network Theory. The virus network is not developed on an existing infrastructure, but is formed by the dynamic connection of countless living and inanimate actors. In this process, not only the body, droplets, vehicles, masks, elevator buttons, etc. become actors, but even the hospital has become a node connecting the virus and the host. In the process of virus transmission, the most important thing is not the content, effect or even media that people pay attention to in the era of mass communication, but the connection and network. This is not the traditional tree-like mode of mass communication, but what Gilles Deleuze called the "root-and-stem mode". The "network" in latour’s actor network is inspired by the rootstock theory, which holds that the formation of the network does not spread outward according to a fixed hierarchical path, but extends horizontally at will like rootstock, which cannot be described by a unified model. Human and non-human actors make the establishment and expansion of this network full of contingency and complexity.
From the perspective of communication efficiency, the network communication of viruses exceeds mass communication and is closer to the communication network of social platforms. The history of virus transmission is earlier than that of human beings, and of course it is much earlier than mass communication. However, the way of information transmission of human beings has only recently gradually approached this form, such as "viral marketing" through social networks.
As the COVID-19 epidemic spread around the world, different countries and regions faced the same virus, and the Eight Immortals crossed the sea, showing their magical powers. If the spread of virus is brought into a larger category of communication, these differences seem to be discussed from the perspective of media view. In epidemic prevention and control, the media construction in different countries and regions has a direct impact on local human actions.
If divided by ideal types, the media view behind the epidemic response can be divided into two types: one regards people as media, and the other regards viruses as media.
People are regarded as the media, and the virus is the content to be carried. Therefore, before the relevant vaccines have been invented and put into use on a large scale, the flow of people must be controlled to curb the spread of the virus. The representative of this media view is China’s early epidemic response. In addition to Wuhan’s "city closure", it also adopted a grid-based management method throughout the country, treating everyone indiscriminately as the media of the virus, dividing them according to their places of residence, and subdividing them into streets, neighborhood committees, communities and other grass-roots units, so as to strictly guard against death and defend the land.
Restricting the movement of people to a limited range for isolation is the most traditional way of epidemic prevention, and it can also solve the problem of accelerating society through social suspension and returning to the pre-modern society where chickens and dogs hear about each other. This tradition echoes with the Shiwu system and Baojia system since Shang Yang’s political reform in the pre-Qin period. But the difference is that the new grid management uses information technology means such as digital technology and big data analysis to accurately monitor individuals. The traditional mutual visual monitoring between people and Foucault’s "panoramic prison" monitoring have been developed into data monitoring, or Byung-ChulHan’s "panoramic perspective prison" monitoring. Moreover, it can be predicted that for a long time to come, personal digital labels similar to health codes will be retained as the experience of population management.
Psychic politics
[Germany] Han Bingzhe/Zhu
Guan Yuhong/Translation
CITIC Publishing Group, 2019-01
From the perspective of ideological history, "taking people as media" is also unique in China’s communication concept. For example, in the pre-Qin period, there was a saying, "How about cutting Ke? No axe to chop. How do you marry that wife? Bandit media can’t "(Book of Songs, National Style, Civil Style)," The reason is weak and the media is clumsy, fearing that the introduction is not solid ","If you are fond of repairing things, why use your husband as the media "(Li Sao)," The father is not the media for his son. If you are a father, you will be praised, not if it is not your father; It is not my sin, but human sin "("Zhuangzi Fables ") and other statements all emphasize the importance of" media-(female) people ". In China’s traditional concept, "media" is an active actor, and she is not playing the role of a passive "messenger" who transmits information, but plays a key role in the connection.
On the contrary, the tradition of taking tools as media only regards the media as something external to people, which is often overlooked and becomes a hidden intermediary because of its "in hand" state. We use tools to achieve the present purpose, and the media as tools are often neglected when they function normally, so McLuhan thinks that most people only value the influence of media content and ignore the influence of media grammar, which is one of the influences of media.
Gutenberg is brilliant: the birth of printing civilization
[Plus] marshall mcluhan/with
Yang Chenguang/Translation
Beijing institute of technology press, March 2014.
The tradition of using tools as media is more inclined to achieve goals by scientific means. Under the guidance of this concept, people are not the media, but viruses are the media. The virus is composed of RNA or DNA wrapped in protein shell, which spreads the genetic information in RNA or DNA from the source of infection to the cells of the host. Based on this, to control the epidemic, we must first control the spread of the virus. This is also the first method adopted by South Korea: comprehensive detection, rapid screening, isolation and treatment of virus carriers. The reason for adopting this method is to ensure that the normal order of the whole society will not be destroyed to the greatest extent by accurately controlling the virus carriers. However, this media view and its policies will face the trade-off between collective life safety and individual freedom. If the collective life safety cannot be guaranteed for the sake of individual freedom (that is, Foucault’s right to "want you to live"), the rulers will face enormous political pressure, such as the initial reaction of Italy and the United States. On the other hand, the restrictions on individual freedom will also encounter a rebound, such as the anti-segregation protests in many places in the United States.
Of course, the two media views of man-made media and virus-based media are only two extremes, but they are not completely mutually exclusive. As McLuhan said, one medium will also become the content of another medium. In practice, virus control also involves the control of people, but not all people are treated as control objects indiscriminately.
Historian William H. McNeill mentioned these two different levels of concepts when he talked about micro-parasitic system and giant parasitic system in Plague and Man, but did not clearly explain the relationship between them. If the country (Leviathan) is regarded as a giant parasitic system, we can see that under different media views, the giant parasitic system is linked with the micro parasitic system.
Plague and man
[America] william mcneill/with.
Yu Xinzhong and Bi Huicheng/Translation
CITIC Publishing Group, 2018-05
People-centered grid management is based on the super mobilization ability of all-powerful government, but there are also problems of centralized central power and lack of flexibility in local implementation, which leads to the phenomenon of barbaric law enforcement; At the same time, it is easy to fall into the institutional dilemma of "chaos as soon as it is released, and death as soon as it is managed". In addition, using human as a medium may also lead to the tension of interpersonal relationship and the collapse of trust. Susan Sontag said in Metaphor of Diseases that although society gives different meanings to different diseases through metaphor, the most dangerous thing is the war metaphor against all diseases. Linguists such as Leikauf found that metaphor constructs the concept of thinking about the world. In an exceptional situation like war, there will be binary opposition between friends and enemies, and violence against imaginary enemies that is not morally condemned. Therefore, under the metaphor of war, it is possible to encourage everyone to fight against everyone by treating everyone indiscriminately as a vector of the virus. Under the guidance of this general war idea, monitoring, distrust and violent conflicts will emerge one after another during the epidemic isolation period. This will further reduce the poor social capital of individuals and affect the public’s political participation. This cannot but attract our attention.
However, differentiated surveillance with virus as the medium may lead to a leak, and if there are virus carriers who have not been identified in time, it may lead to an outbreak. Asymptomatic virus carriers and inaccurate test results will also make mistakes in virus control. Therefore, there is always tension between individual freedom and collective security. Whether it is the debate caused by agamben’s exception against segregation, or the conflict between the federal government and some state governments on the issue of segregation, it highlights the dilemma of this media view.
If a virus is regarded as a vector, what type does it belong to? German media scholar Kramer regards virus as transcription media, because the goal of virus is to replicate itself to the maximum extent. Virus transcription breaks through the transcription mode of information media, and can achieve accurate virus transcription process between hosts. In the dissemination of information, the biggest problem is the asymmetry of encoding and decoding. speaking into the air is the fate of human communication, and it is also the internal driving force of the "linguistic turn" of philosophy and social sciences in the 20th century. Of course, the transcription of the virus is not static, and gene variation can also lead to differences in transcription, but compared with information transmission, the accuracy of this transcription is already quite high, and the variation of this gene will further strengthen the transmission efficiency of the virus and make it difficult to control. Therefore, the differences caused by gene variation in the transcription process, from the perspective of the spread of this kind of virus, have strengthened its infectivity and identity.
Talking to the air: the conceptual history of communication
[America] John Peters/by
Deng Jianguo/Translation
Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 2017-01
Virus is not only a transcription medium, but also an inscription media. The early inscription media are time-biased media, usually bronzes, stone tablets, stone drums and rocks. The information inscribed on them has been preserved for a long time and is difficult to change, move and have stability. Modern engraving media are becoming lighter and lighter, such as vinyl records, films, tapes, hard disks, optical disks, paper, etc., and they become erasable. However, from the perspective of evidence, the engraving media will leave material traces, which are essentially different from the sounds and images in the natural state. So even if the hard disk is formatted, it will still leave some previous information fragments.
Image from Unsplash @Adrian Korte
As an engraving medium, virus will first leave a mark on people’s bodies. In addition to temporary symptoms, the body will also form immunity to the virus. Immunity is a process of body memory and leaving traces. According to these traces, the immune system will recognize the virus in the future and quickly annihilate the invaders. Immunity is an inscription, but also a sacrifice: the loss of some cells in exchange for the overall safety. This is exactly the same logic as the ritual sacrifice by human beings-using the lives of a few people instead of everyone else in the group to sacrifice to the gods.
From a longer evolutionary process, the genetic information of the virus will also be absorbed by human DNA and become a part of it. Endogenous retrovirus will also be permanently integrated with the genetic material of the host, emerge from the genetic gene at a certain moment, infect cells and spread. This virus has become a part of the host genome and cannot be eliminated.
For millions of years, endogenous retroviruses have been invading our genome repeatedly, and the number has been amazing today. Each of us carries nearly 100,000 DNA fragments of endogenous retroviruses in our genome, accounting for 8% of the total human DNA. Conversely, the 20,000 genes responsible for protein coding in the human genome only account for 1.2%. Scientists have sorted out other small DNA fragments in the human genome that have been copied synchronously and will be reinserted. The number of these DNA fragments is as high as millions. They speculate that many of these fragments may also have evolved from endogenous retroviruses. After millions of years of evolution, these invaders have been deprived of a lot of DNA, leaving only the most critical genes for self-replication. In other words, our genome is full of viruses. (Virus Planet, chapter 6, by Karl Zimmer, translated by Liu Yang, Guangxi Normal University Press, 2019. )
Virus planet
[America] Carl Zimmer/
Liu Yang/Translation
Guangxi Normal University Press, 2019-04
As an engraving medium, virus will leave traces in the collective memory of the community. The isolation of virus carriers is similar to the original sacrifice ceremony, that is, the loss of a few people is exchanged for the safety of the whole life. At the same time, isolated groups are labeled, even stigmatized and excluded, and become "naked life" (human sacrifice) in the sense of agamben. These people were labeled as sacred and sacrificed to God, but they were excluded from "us". The Diamond Princess, which drifted at sea in the early days of the epidemic and made it difficult for passengers to land, can be regarded as a vivid metaphor of naked life.
When death opens the privilege of "storyteller", the virus has the power to leave traces in collective memory. Walter Benjamin found that in modern society, death was gradually excluded from daily life by the technology of medical treatment and hospice care. With the disappearance of the visibility of death, the right of the deceased to tell stories is correspondingly deprived.
We can perceive that for centuries, in the general consciousness, the concept of death is no longer as ubiquitous and vivid as it used to be. This decline intensified in its later period. In the 19th century, the bourgeois society created a secondary effect through the health and social, private and public systems, and this effect may be the main intention of the subconscious mind: to make people avoid death. Death was once a social process in personal life, with the most typical significance. ….. In modern society, death is being pushed away from the vision of the living. In the past, there was no family, no room where no one had died. Nowadays, people live in eternity that has never been cared about by the eternal heartless residents-death. When he was dying, his children and grandchildren hid him in nursing homes or hospitals. ….. Death is a storyteller’s permission to tell everything in the world. He borrowed authority from death, in other words, his story refers to the history of nature. (The Storyteller, in Enlightenment: Selected Works of Benjamin, pp. 104-105, edited by hannah arendt, translated by Zhang Xudong and Wang Ban, Life, Reading and New Knowledge Joint Publishing Company, 2008. )
Enlightenment: Selected Works of Benjamin
[Germany] hannah arendt/Editor
Zhang Xudong and Wang Ban/Translation
Life Reading Xinzhi Sanlian Bookstore, 2008-09.
Through some mass media reports on the epidemic, as well as numerous personalized narratives on social media platforms and short video platforms, the right of the dead and dying to tell stories has been restored. Like many stories that have been told repeatedly in human history, these stories make others who have not witnessed the sacrifice understand what happened and give society the opportunity to gain public health, cultural and political immunity. The controversy surrounding Fangfang’s diary illustrates the importance of this kind of inscription from one side. Fangfang’s diary is one of the voices, even if there are some flaws, it is also a precious story. At the same time, we need more different levels, richer and more three-dimensional records. The new media makes it possible for us to express and preserve these stories related to death. It will be meaningful for future generations if there is a network database to store and show the history of these polyphony.
If SARS in 2003 can leave such an imprint on the collective memory of the society, perhaps we will avoid more sacrifices in the face of the COVID-19 epidemic this time. It’s never too late to mend. Viral media leave a mark on the group, so that this generation can think and discuss. Perhaps we will perform better in dealing with other public crises in the future.
The inscription of virus on culture is reflected in the reflection on anthropocentrism. During the epidemic, wild animals reappeared in cities and highways, the coastline of Portsmouth, England became green and clear, and beautiful jellyfish could be seen in Venice, Italy. A cartoon compares "the earth you think is now" with "the earth actually is now". The former is that the virus knocked the earth to the ground and stepped on one foot, while the latter is that the earth in the hospital bed is happily taken care of by the virus. Human’s plundering of nature and the unrestrained way of obtaining food make the complexity of its virus bank reach an unprecedented level, and those viruses that have lived in the intermediate host for tens of thousands of years stare at human beings like an abyss.
It is said that the word virus comes from the Roman Empire, which means both snake venom and human semen. Viruses are deadly in a sense, but at the same time, their cultural imprint is creative. It all depends on whether our culture is willing to leave traces and what traces it leaves.
(Originally published in the 29th issue of Xinrui Weekly, the title picture is from Unsplash @camilo jimenez)