The Pandemic Visual Regime: Visuality and Performativity in the Covid-19-Crisis (2023) (original) (raw)

2023, The Pandemic Visual Regime: Visuality and Performativity in the Covid-19-Crisis, in: Julia Ramírez-Blanco and Francesco Spampinato, The Pandemic Visual Regime. Visuality and Performativity in the COVID-19 Crisis, pp. 195-216.

A decisive effect of the worldwide spread of the coronavirus is the transformation of digital lifestyle media into state-used recording, storage and distribution media. With the pandemic spread of the virus, the tectonics of digital power may have shifted the way forward. The global threat posed by the corona virus is transforming mobile media and their software applications into state-organized surveillance technologies. Because the Big Five of the digital economy, the Internet companies Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon have faced competition in the area of data collection and analysis. On the occasion of Covid-19, national health authorities, secret services and police apparatus, together with IT companies, initiated a systematic collection and evaluation of usage data. Mobility tracking is regarded by health authorities and government officials as a reliable data basis for enforcing political decisions as legitimate. Seen in this way, digital media take over the empirical basis of political action. The disciplinary techniques of state surveillance and punishment are migrating into all areas of digital communication and affect mobile media (geo-tracking), stop corona apps (monitoring), social media (blaming) and selfies (self-evidence). In a global comparison, I will compare different national strategies and also include non-western countries. In this context, I am investigating the biosurveillance in China, Singapore and Hong Kong (SenseTime, TikTok etc.), the secret service control in Israel and the use of robotics in Tunisia. What are the consequences of these shifts in the procurement of information in the era of the corona control system? In my contribution, I deal with image-political and mediatechnological aspects of the data visualizations of mobility, which were used by Internet companies, national governments and health authorities for different purposes in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic.