Viral networks in pandemic time
Originally published by: Find your digital self | FySelf Blog
The days that have passed, and there has been many of them, leave behind events that have become stories of sad realities. On viral networks you can find everything: alarming news, fears and uncertainties about an uncertain, unexpected, unpredictable end…
Hospitals collapse with patients who can’t make it through a waiting time to receive life-saving care. Others, on a trial run, are chosen for a treatment that resets their time. Doctors who fight tirelessly for life .. or better, for our lives, actually everyone’s. Hope is fed by waiting for a breath that does not come.
Viral networks and the realized dystopia
It seems that those visions of fiction, created basing on technology, emerged from creative magic, from an imagination full with lonely cities devastated by events that go beyond the unheard of, were predictions of our time. The dystopia of yesterday is today´s sad reality, beyond fiction, magic, imagination and technology.
Isolation is so far the most effective vaccine, social distance the best space for human interaction and technologies, the antidote to occupy so many hours of waiting, heal the distance and keep company to loneliness.
In these sad and uncertain times crowned with a pandemic, the disease spreads truth and hope. They transfer the news into global message chains, which turn social networks into viral conduits of exchanges.
Is all the information real in times of coronavirus?
News, songs, images, cards, videos, invade a global space of human interaction. The virus increases this coming and going, takes it to limits where reality and fiction find their closest synergie point. The constant forwarding, to any destination and at any distance, makes the transfer of information viral.
Truth and the uncertain get mixed up in circulating news on platforms, confusing us in raids of viral transmissions. There is also no lack of constant detractions that lie and confuse the real, which no one tries to contrast and circulates from one destination to another, transferring falsehoods.
Is it all false perhaps on this viral networks?
But being viral, doesn’t mean we talk about misguided intentions. The prayers of the child who calls us to stay at home, the new information that reaches us without delay, the news of the distant friend infected with fear, the doctor’s timely advice, the meme that makes you smiles in spite of so many sorrows.
It's because these are times of pandemic, that networks brim over with viral-social interaction.
Valid questions, with or without pandemic
Have you thought about the reaction, emotion or sensation generated by receiving incredible and extraordinary news on your phone?
Don’t trust everything. Very often fake news are built for political and economic purposes. Do not doubt even for a second, that there are people who enjoy the feeling of virtual panic expressed on the networks. When something surprises us, the will to share it is greater. That grabs us and drives us immediately !!!
Have you noticed the veracity of the information?
Check its veracity in an original and official source before being a transmitter.
Are you an immediate transmitter of this news?
Think for few minutes before doing so. The immediate broadcast makes you part of an endless chain of news that goes viral in a matter of minutes.
Do you select people before forwarding the message?
Generally, we transmit news to people we are known as assiduous recipients of any information and who at the same time send you the information they receive. Reciprocity of information in these cases is not the best way of social exchange.
Thus we become part of endless chains of infected news.
I suggest you consult this page for more tips that may help you as well:
Information is power. In uncertain and ultra-connected times, it is even more important to cultivate a critical eye to distinguish chaff from wheat on the Internet.
