An exploration of the infodemic imaginaries emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic

COVID-19 lockdowns have impacted every dimension of social life. Moreover, the constant risk of being infected by the SARSCOV- 2 virus threatened the ordinary experience of individuals and social groups. This health emergency is a large-scale crisis, which yielded a “symbolic and emotional force” (Alexander, 2018) influencing risk perception and guiding social action. In this context, the communicative dimension played an essential role. Infodemic, considered as a form of symbolic “contamination” (Douglas, 2021; Camorrino and Savona, 2023), seems to have intensified the pre-existing condition of uncertainty and 56 anguish produced by the risk of contagion. The different positions of truth within the same scientific community (Giddens, 1994), the “viral spread” of data and information, sometimes erroneous or conflicting, the dissemination of fake news and alternative visions to the mainstream (Bloomfield et. al., 2021; Gruzd et al., 2021) shaped different “imaginaries”, which, in turn, affected how individuals and groups responded to the pandemic. Our contribution aims to explore the diverse “infodemic imaginaries” (Durand, 2013; Camorrino and Savona, 2023) (e.g., ecospiritual, techno-scientific, conspirative) emerged during the COVID-19 crisis in Italy: each of these imaginaries is based on peculiar “universe of meaning” (Berger and Luckmann, 2020) and truth positions. To this aim, we adopted a qualitative approach, by in-depth interviewing, also by using a photostimulus technique, individuals belonging to foreign and local communities in Naples: in this way, we aimed to capture how the infodemic contributed to the production of diverse ways to “imagine” the pandemic, as well as the individuals’ and social groups’ diverse “emotional responses” (Lupton, 2003) to risk and uncertainty, linking such responses to the imaginary in which they were embedded. The study contributes to the understanding of how the dimension of imaginary affects the perception and management of collective events, especially with reference to the critical ones.