Contextualizing Digital Media in the Global Pandemic (Panel)
As we (North American academics) think and, moreover, live in the shadow of the global pandemic, the role digital media plays in our no-longer-ordinary lives becomes increasingly salient. During the quarantine, participation in digital lives can be said to be no longer a supplement or replacement for “real life”; instead, it seems to have become its constitutive activity. Nevertheless, this new entanglement between the pandemic and digital media is not devoid of national, political, economic, and linguistic specificities: issues of accessibility, censorship, credibility, and the like cannot be addressed in the abstract. Instead, they only become visible when uses of digital media is contextualized and compared across national and linguistic boundaries.