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Spectacle as a Response
The way Covid-19 pandemic is being understood and addressed makes it a spectacle in the Debordian sense, in which all the social relations are mediated through images and appearances. Where even the desire of a safe and healthy life is dealt not with dignity, and effective, accessible healthcare, but through virtual images. Such a spectacle, in turn, creates a world that would be connected more, while the people would live a fragmented life on which they will increasingly lose their control.
The threshold that we stand at today represents a well-discussed and an obvious question, which is, how will the CoViD-19 pandemic transform the world around us? The significance of this question cannot be overstated. In order to reach a possibility of unpacking as to what will become of the world due to the CoViD-19 situation, we need to dissect and decipher how our world perceives this pandemic. As we will see below, the way we perceive a pandemic determines the ways we respond to it, and the measures we undertake accordingly, in turn, contribute to what we become as a post-pandemic society. In this article, we attempt to outline the nature of the responses to the pandemic and what those responses really embody.
How is the world perceiving CoViD-19: As a disease, that is, merely a medical phenomenon? Or a pandemic, which is much more than a disease, a vector behind a global crisis of social, economic, political and cultural dimensions? It is clear from the worldwide responses that CoViD-19 is considered much more than a disease. Officially declared as a pandemic, it has overarching implications on our everyday material and social life. In order to understand the distinction between the two, let us see what essentially constitutes the two.
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