Niente sarà più come prima. Il Covid-19 come narrazione apocalittica di successo = Nothing will ever be the same: COVID 19, an apocalyptic narrative of success

Abstract

The paper aims to investigate the interactions between public, media and authorities that emerged during the Covid-19 emergency as variables of a state of systemic anxiety, characteristic of information societies. The Coronavirus crisis involved around four billion individuals. No pandemic or traumatic event on a global scale, however serious or risky, had ever managed to lead authorities and multitudes to such a resolution. The measures prescribed for the containment of the pandemic implied maximum physical confinement and the widest freedom guaranteed to our digital avatars. That was the opportunity for an unprecedented and massive transhumance in digital territories. Using the paradigms of fear as a latent and functional emotional constant in advanced information society, (Beck, 1986; Bauman, 2006), the investigation makes a comparison between some mechanisms of defense against states of shock and some of the media narratives of the emergency by which the italian public constructed its own mediated experience of the pandemic during the quarantine. In particular, the theme of the apocalyptic/millennial narrative is studied in more detail, in the light of various literary theories that describe its characteristics and dynamics. The aim is to demonstrate how the collective anxiety state can be traced back to a constant oscillation on different semantic clusters, rather than a variable consequence of concrete events.