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New Communication in the Post-Pandemic Era: Media, Education, and Information

by Hasan Kemal Süher (Volume editor) Deniz Denizel (Volume editor) Tuna Tetik (Volume editor)
©2021 Edited Collection 248 Pages

Summary

New Communication in the Post-Pandemic Era: Media, Education, and Information is a collection of contemporary post-positivist research and cultural/interpretative studies that explores new areas, redefines old concepts, and proposes rare discourses over communication theories, and portrays a new scene upon the edge of the global crisis by COVID-19 pandemic, which might lead to an ultimate paradigm shift pushing the post-industrial societies to a new complex of multi-layered structural regressions. Covering a broad range of multidisciplinary topics, –including consumer behavior, advertising strategies, public relations, blockchain technologies, new education channels, labor economics, disaster politics, health engagement, corporate communication, information systems, streaming services, music reception, reality television, animation, filmmaking, new personality models, and brand-new aesthetic styles– this manuscript of selected essays and articles is optimally designed for academics, researchers, educators, media professionals, entrepreneurs, executives, organizers, scientists, artists, public relations specialists, and students who intend to enhance their understanding of how the structures of ‘New Communication’ resist, accept, or repurpose the new historical conditions of the global crisis through media, education, and information.

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • About the editors
  • About the book
  • This eBook can be cited
  • Acknowledgements
  • Contents
  • Foreword (Haluk Gürgen)
  • Nostalgia for the Past or New Horizons for the Future: A Short Introduction to Information Practices of the Pandemic (Tolga Hepdinçler)
  • The Effect of E-Service Quality, E-Satisfaction, and E-Loyalty on Consumers’ Online Repurchase Intentions during Pandemic in Turkey (Yeşim Ulusu, Hasan Kemal Suher, Öykü Türkeli, and Görkem Bir)
  • How Advertising, the Most Powerful Tool of Marketing, Survived during and after COVID-19? (Şafak Şahin)
  • Keep Calm and Animate (Nazlı Eda Noyan and Murat Çöpçü)
  • Decentralizing Media Education in the Post-Pandemic Period: Using the Blockchain Revolution as a Disruptive Innovation (Sinan Aşçı)
  • Winners of the Catastrophe: How Streaming Services Proved Their Sovereignty during the Pandemic of 21st Century? (Nisa Yıldırım and Nilay Ulusoy)
  • Research, Storytelling, and Filmmaking during the Pandemic (Savaş Arslan)
  • Desktop Cinema as a New Aesthetic Style in the Post-Pandemic Era: Watching the Movie through Protagonist’s Computer Screen (Tuna Tetik)
  • #Stayhomestayhungry: Governmental Use of Social Media and the Economics of Pandemic (Afra Balcı Arslan)
  • The Survival of the Turkish Reality Television in the Pandemic Era (Dilay Özgüven and Ece Arıhan)
  • Evolution of Music Reception: Transformation in the Post-Pandemic Era (Cemal Barkın Engin and Yahya Burak Tamer)
  • New Precariat: Voice-Over Artists Performing at Home in the Time of Global Pandemic (Ömer Vatanartıran)
  • A New Lens Towards Games in Society: Flaneur, Gameur, and Beyond (Çakır Aker)
  • Managing the State of Uncertainty: How to Communicate the Inside During COVID-19? (Elif Engin, Burcu Eker Akgöz, and Selcan Yeşilyurt)
  • Dialogic Communication in the Shadow of COVID-19: An Analysis of How the Largest Turkish Companies Used Twitter (Nilüfer Geysi, İdil Karademirlidağ Suher, and Çisil Sohodol)
  • Conclusion: From Cybernetic Eschatology to Pandemic Theology (Deniz Denizel)
  • List of Figures
  • List of Tables
  • Author Biographies

←12 | 13→

Foreword

The present pandemic, due to which we are suffering the loss of many lives and struggling with economic hardship, has forced us to rethink and question our lives, jobs, consumption habits, and many more aspects. We have become more reflective of our social and moral values, which are among the main determinants of our choices and behavior. We have begun to look at life, people and work from different vantage points to reevaluate and gain new habits. As a result of our growing ability to dispense with what we used to believe to be indispensable, we become braver, and we adopt and embrace new perspectives and new behavior with more ease. In short, we are now in the process of a rapid change on all fronts.

Unfortunately, however, we have also observed many governments fail the ordeal of the pandemic. Critical errors have been committed on many issues. Countless hardships have been and continue to be endured due to delayed and inefficient decisions, faulty implementations and shortages that are still to be remedied. Economic hardships and losses have become unavoidable. Businesses have closed down; poverty and unemployment have increased. We have witnessed the governors of numerous countries, including those of developed countries such as the USA and UK, specifically eschew clear and transparent communication of timely and accurate information, hide the truth and even lie blatantly. Sadly, people lived and still struggle to live through this situation in great astonishment, anxiously thinking and not knowing how to preserve their lives, jobs and incomes, with a burning pain inside and paying a dire price. In short, the pandemic was not managed correctly. We failed to implement what we knew about how to manage a crisis. While the crisis had to be managed in a coordinated effort under the leadership of the central government, guided primarily by public and local authorities and the media and all other civil and private institutions, this could not be achieved in many countries. They failed to come together to join forces and act in solidarity.

The pandemic started and continues to unfold in the already ongoing era of post-truth. Citizens were unable to reach true and accurate information, notably due to this era’s main premises. We have deviated from the principles of clarity and transparency. Truths have been veiled; lies have become ordinary. Official statements that are not founded on facts and objective truths deepened the crisis. As they failed to fulfill their promises to their fellow citizens, authorities did not shy away from resorting to lies. In this atmosphere, in which accountability was ←13 | 14→put on hold, everyone spoke as they saw fit; some believed some did not, words lost their critical value.

The post-truth era is defined as an age in which it does not matter much whether what is being said and explained is a lie as long as they match people’s beliefs and sentiments. As a consequence of the intense flow of information and especially of the confusion created by disinformation and informational pollution that push their intellectual limits, people have given up on searching for facts, for the truth that would help them understand and explain what is happening around them. The dictionary definition for post-truth, which was chosen as the word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries in 2016, is “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” The current literature on the subject observes that addressing emotions and personal opinions is more effective than objective truths in shaping public opinion and behavior. It emphasizes that compatibility between reality and our judgment of it in our minds is no longer the issue, that everyone has their truth and truth itself no longer matters. It is becoming increasingly common practice to twist and transform objective truths to one’s own opinions and convictions, to accept lies as if they were true, rather than harmonize people’s opinions and convictions with the truth. For example, research shows that voters support a political party and its leader based on their feelings, personal convictions, beliefs and judgment, and not whether the party’s and its leader’s discourse is founded on facts. The persistent and blind defense of fabricated or manipulated truths by the masses is the most tragic aspect of this post-truth era.

Generally, the post-truth era manifested itself very clearly, especially with the 2016 presidential elections in the USA and the Brexit referendum in the UK around the same time. Indeed, in both these cases, campaigning politicians distorted the truth to an extent incomparable to previous eras. Moreover, data proved that their political discourses were inconsistent and even full of false statements.

However, with the pandemic, we are also witnessing populist politics, which were on the rise until recently and avoided clarity, transparency, and accountability, lose part of their effect on the masses. Many people attribute Trump’s election defeat, who had to leave the presidency to Biden, to his failure to recognize the gravity of the pandemic and manage the ensuing crisis, to his veiling of truth and his lies. Academic and political spheres discuss whether this situation in the USA could also affect other leaders who use populist politics. The opinion that, in the post-pandemic world, people will not be able to discard truth as ←14 | 15→quickly as they used to and that partisanships relying on strong emotional bonds will weaken is also constantly gaining supporters.

In fact, it seems highly unlikely that the post-truth era will come to an end and that populist leaders will lose their power until the hegemony of the neoliberal economy and populism that continues to mark the world of politics ever-increasingly since the eighties are ended. However, history shows us very clearly that all pandemics prompted some radical changes, be they positive or negative. So, perhaps, even if they do not disappear for good, as a consequence of this pandemic, neoliberalism and its handmaid populism will be exposed and lose power and help people lift the blinds over their eyes.

Numerous scientific researches, articles, and books on the changes and transformations brought on by this global pandemic have been and will be published. I believe that this book will hold a special place among these. This edited volume which consists of articles by academics of Bahçeşehir University’s Faculty of Communication, discusses, from multiple perspectives and various areas of the field of communication, the pandemic’s effects and the transformation that it sets in motion. Therefore I wanted to ask, in this brief foreword, whether the pandemic could help bury post-truth, populism, and their mastermind neoliberalism into the depths of history as a way to make up, partially, for the great suffering it caused.

I believe that in order to re-establish a more conscious, responsible, productive, and happy life that prioritizes the sustainability of nature and the human, we should continue our search for the truth that is nurtured by the knowledge of reality. Once the time comes for a calmer reflection on our present situation, this study and similar ones will, in my opinion, contribute to our analysis and understanding of the pandemic era and how it shaped our future. I want to congratulate and thank all my colleagues who contributed to this book.

Haluk Gürgen
Prof. at Bahçeşehir University,
Public Relations and Publicity Department.

←16 | 17→

Tolga Hepdinçler

Nostalgia for the Past or New Horizons for the Future: A Short Introduction to Information Practices of the Pandemic

At the time of writing this text, the number of cases worldwide was over 150 million, and the number of people who lost their lives since late 2019 was over 3 million. As stated in the title of the book, we were far from the period we can call Post. Therefore, the recommendation of this study can be seen as questioning a possible future. With an optimistic disposition, the experiences of the present can give insight into the projected Post. Although the process is incomplete and the damage is not fully calculated, each island of experience that occurs during the pandemic process provides a view for possible options for the future. Here, two major questions about the -post provide motivation to the academicians and intellectuals although they echo banal: “Will we go back to the beautiful days of past?” and “are we going to build a brand-new world order?” These questions, which are nostalgic at one end and futuristic at the other, both can be answered with experiences in the present. The nostalgic axis of this motivation reminds me, a Deleuzian term repetition, that he concerned on events connected to each other throughout cycles; similarities constitute equalities and laws (Deleuze, 2014, p. 1). This also is strictly connected to our habits that generalize our conception of the world. We can easily assume that our pleasure, joy, and passion were taken away by an unpredictable law. May be more devastating exercises like medieval plagues, Spanish Flu or more recent HIV, Ebola, SARS did the same thing to our planet. But we know how to deal with them, and we know how to conquer our lost pleasures. This creates a psychological motivation to protect ourselves from an ongoing trauma and optimism for turning back our habits, hoping that the sun will rise every day, the waterfall flows down as they were. On the other hand, this optimism reminds me of an unfinished painting titled Dying Edith (1918) by Egon Schiele Austrian painter who died because of the Spanish Flu. The painting sketches wife of Schiele, Edith, infected as like her husband, in her deathbed with her sick face, she died a few days later and Egon, also died three days after her. The picture, which gives the impression that they have silently accepted the disease they were caught, can take away the thought that we will return to good days. It causes us to remember the inevitability of falling into a pessimism that causes us to despair that every time we lose, every experience is ←17 | 18→difficult to replace. However, the same painter in his finished picture before just before their pass, The Family (1918) contrary depicts a hope for the future during the most devastating and worst traumatic disease in world history. It depicts both Egon and Edith with their unborn child in a hypothetical time, may be in the future, while the world in turmoil. This is a future that never happened before; it is a new order, a hope to the future during the most devastating and worst traumatic disease in world history. As the modern conception of time taught us, we move to a future with a progress that consists of experiences of the past as knowledge that are not spoiled by memories. The memories trapped with traumas cannot find a place in progress. Thus, forgetting is the precious diamond for us as like Marcel Proust, who tried to regain the time, he lost. In his seminal seven volumes novel on time In Search of Lost Time (1913–1927), he constructs a universe where all the past pains, sorrows, and despairs cured by the desire for an ultimate reality. Deleuze stated again, the search Proust had it is not a process or effort of a recall, exploration of memory is to be taken as “the search for the truth” (Deleuze, 2008, p. 3). Perhaps what the pandemic makes us think of will be the lessons to be learned to think about what the next new forms of truth will be and to establish the so-called new world order at the intellectual level by leaving the past behind. Our memories about the sorrowful past are there only they needed to cure the past for the future. Thus, while the pandemic is expanding, we may be forcing ourselves to forget what causes pain and hoping to cure it by designing a better future.

Under all this optimism, treating the COVID-19 pandemic as one of the events that shook human history can be presented to us as a meaningful (may be a pessimist) horizon. For example, the concept of the black swan, conceptualized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his inspiring work, may offer the possibility for us to analyze the current situation and its possible consequences. Taleb defines the concept of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, which was published by Taleb in the distant past in 2007, in three stages. First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable (Taleb, 2007, p. xviii). While he widens his examples through the dawn of the WWI, the rise of Hitler and the succeeding war, the collapse of Soviets, and 9/11, he simply says black swan is a process of rarity, extreme impact, and retrospective predictability. Although Taleb stated that, while COVID-19 was limited to China at the beginning of the epidemic, it is not a Black Swan, but may be a portent of a more fragile global system (Avishai, 2020), It is possible to call it ←18 | 19→the black swan, the size of which it reaches today. The more recent experience of the Spanish Flu that claimed 50 million casualties worldwide has been over a century and other epidemics of the 20th and 21st century affected a limited population. This makes our pandemic experience predictable as a possibility but not predictable due to the extreme size of its impacts on the human population. The next step will be to find answers and explanations, then to understand how we cure, revised, or transform the global effects of the disease. Although we have no idea when the pandemic will end, all the treatments that were offered will create defensive anticipation. As Fishman stated, as like intellectual responses after the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing and the 9/11 attack, the epidemic started in Wuhan can be described as a new form of destruction of catastrophic proportions as a transforming event. Although he stated with a negative fashion as like;

Details

Pages
248
Year
2021
ISBN (PDF)
9783631861776
ISBN (ePUB)
9783631862797
ISBN (MOBI)
9783631864982
ISBN (Softcover)
9783631855652
DOI
10.3726/b18868
Language
English
Publication date
2021 (September)
Published
Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Warszawa, Wien, 2021. 248 pp., 9 fig. b/w, 18 tables.

Biographical notes

Hasan Kemal Süher (Volume editor) Deniz Denizel (Volume editor) Tuna Tetik (Volume editor)

Hasan Kemal Suher is a member of the Advertising Department at Bahçesehir University. He is the Dean of the Communication Faculty and the head of the Department of Advertising. He received his Ph.D. in Advertising and Public Relations from Anadolu University, Turkey. He is currently teaching several undergraduate courses on media planning, research in advertising, advertising campaign, and graduate courses on historical and social research, mass communication theories and research. He has edited many inter/national books. His research interests include creative industries, new trends in communication education, and data analysis with SPSS. He continues his research at national and international levels. Tuna Tetik is a member of the Film and Television Department at Bahçesehir University. He received his doctoral degree at Bahçes¸ ehir University, Cinema and Media Research program, and directed short fi lms and a documentary that received international awards. His research interests are superheroes, comics, transmedia, fi lm genres, video-on-demand services, and video games. He is the co-editor of Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Narrative Aesthetics in Video Games (2021). He is currently lecturing several undergraduate courses on digital editing and film production. Deniz Denizel is a research assistant in the Cartoon and Animation Department and a graduate student in Game Design at Bahçes¸ ehir University. After receiving his B.F.A. in Photography from Dokuz Eylül University, he exhibited in and curated solo and group exhibitions; published, edited, and reviewed various types of articles; and lectured on photography, fi lm, and video games. His research interests gather around narrative theory, intertextuality, fi lm criticism, and postmodern theories. He is also the co-editor of Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Narrative Aesthetics in Video Games (2021).

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