The semiotics of the anti-COVID-19 mask

The pandemic spreading of the COVID-19 virus has led to the global need to introduce, often by law, the medical face mask, which can undoubtedly be considered as "the object of 2020.” In a few months, most human faces around the world in the public space, but also often in the private space, have been covered with various kinds of protective masks. Very soon, these objects have become the centre of several discursive productions, going from medical reports to media coverage, from artistic representations to ironic memes. The medical face mask was not totally new in the west, where it was already present in special circumstances, like dentists' studios or emergency rooms, and was quite familiar in the east, especially in Japan, China, and Korea. Yet such massive introduction changed the meaning of the medical face mask in every context. Old habits were reconfigured or clashed with the new ones, giving rise to a novel syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of the human face in conjunction with this device and in the context of the global pandemic. The present paper offers an introduction to a semiotic mapping of such radical cultural change and its likely consequences.

Reading Chinese anti-COVID-19 pandemic narratives on facemasks as the art of disaster governance: a semiotic and biopolitical survey

In China and around the world, the global spread of COVID-19 has made wearing a facemask more than a pragmatic or aesthetic individual-level issue: it has instilled in people deontic value. In Chinese anti-epidemic narratives, the semiotic ideology of wearing a facemask has been closely related to collectivism, patriotism and, to a certain degree, nationalism. The facemask not only serves as a protective biomedical device but also as a cultural, political and spatial sign of the line of defence against disorders of the natural system, to establish the order of the social system. This paper argues from the perspective of semiotics and life politics that such mask narratives have effectively helped China prevent the large-scale spread of the epidemic across the nation and have served as a means of collective psychotherapy, paradoxically transforming individual separation into collective spiritual cohesion. Previous semiotic studies of disaster have not paid much attention to plagues or disaster governance discourse, between which biomedicine plays an important role. Thus, this paper aims to shed light on how biomedicine works with politics in coding and decoding the relationship between the natural system of the plague and the social system of governance.

Navigating COVID-19 linguistic landscapes in Vancouver's North Shore: official signs, grassroots literacy artefacts, monolingualism, and discursive convergence

This article describes the changing linguistic landscape on the North Shore of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, during the first three months of the COVID-19 pandemic. I present an account of the visual representation of change along the area's parks and trails, which remained open for socially-distanced exercise during the province's lockdown. Following the principles of visual, walking ethnography, I walked through numerous locations, observing and recording the visual representations of the province's policies and discourses of lockdown and social distancing. Examples of change were most evident in the rapid addition to social space of top-down signs, characterised mainly by multimodality and monolingualism, strategically placed in ways that encouraged local people to abide by social-distancing. However, through this process of observation and exploration, I noticed grassroots semiotic artefacts such as illustrated stones with images and messages that complemented the official signs of the provincial government. As was the case with the official signs and messages, through a process of discursive convergence, these grassroots artefacts performed a role of conveying messages and discourses of social distancing, public pedagogy, and community care.

Photographing COVID-19 on the Philadelphia Landscape: Responses, Realities, Silences, and Reactions

In early January 2020, the World Health Organization announced that a mysterious pneumonia like illness. It was first observed in Wuhan China and was likely caused by a previously unknown coronavirus. By late January, cases of the unknown virus had been detected in several countries throughout the world. In March of that year, the WHO officially declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. After overtaking many countries throughout the world in terms of number of cases and deaths, a national emergency was declared in the United States. Schools began closing, parks were empty, restaurants vacant, businesses closed, churches posted notices that in-person services were ‘canceled until further notice, ' stringent stay at home orders were imposed and the streets were deserted. As someone who has been taking pictures of street life for many years, the usual hustle and bustle of the street was eerily disconcerting. This photo-essay provides a glimpse of the responses, realities, silences, and reactions to COVID-19 on the landscape. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

Accessing to a "Truer Truth”: Conspiracy and Figurative Reasoning From Covid‐19 to the Russia–Ukraine War

This research hypothesizes that all conspiracy theories have dominating isotopies and images‐symbols regardless of ideology or context. As a result, I hypothesized that the common denominator might be discovered in figurative reasoning, which means using the same representations to explain current events, in order to detect an ideal center of the seman-tic universe of conspiracy where the diverse conspiracist fringes converge. Social media invariant topicalizations of the Covid‐19 epidemic and the Russia–Ukraine war are the ideal field to validate this hypothesis. The corpus on which the study was conducted consists of thousands of online items published between February 15, 2020, and October 15, 2022. Within the corpus were chosen posts by QAnon supporters designated as disinformation "superspreaders.”. © 2023 by the author(s);licensee Cogitatio Press (Lisbon, Portugal). TAttribution 4.0 International License (CC BY).

Cultural semiotics as the foundation of political semiotics

Our paper relies on the cultural semiotics of Lotman which we bring to bear on political theory in order to develop a methodological framework that we have referred to as "political semiotics" in our previous work during the past decade. In our first section, we synthesize the core categories of the Essex school (Laclau, Mouffe, and others) of political analysis and the Tartu-Moscow school of cultural semiotics. In the next section, we move further to putting forth a concrete methodological framework for analyzing social/political reality by relating theories of power, governance, and democracy to the Jakobsonian model of communication. We call this method "political form analysis". The guiding idea of the latter is that it is not the content (i. e. substance) of communication, but rather the form (hierarchical relations of the aspects of communication) is the crucial focus of political analysis. In the final section, we illustrate our approach by explaining the constitution of the COVID-19 crisis and their governance in Taiwan. The country has had enormous success in containing the crisis during its first waves, but has also been surprisingly unsuccessful in the third phase (starting in the spring of 2021).

Host control by SP beta phage regulatory switch as potential manipulation strategy

This research studies the aesthetics of organisations and identifies, from a semiotic perspective, the elements of the aesthetics of organisations and their workers' perceptions of them. This research adds to the theoretical development of a new paradigm using a qualitative, retrospective, cross-sectional methodological approach and non-experimental design. To validate the dimensions and variables identified, three empirical research studies were carried out on a sample of 346 people using a semiotic-based method. The study is also quantitative, as the results obtained from the surveys are presented in numerical form in the semiotic matrix, which identifies the dimensions involved in the aesthetics of the organisations. The main contribution of the study is the design of a typology of organisational beauty by which to analyse the aesthetic dimensions of organisations.

The Language of Smell: Code Failure

In today's world filled with complex signs and symbols, visual and auditory channels are the most intensive in semiotic terms. The language of smell, associated with the most ancient reactions, is usually considered as secondary and supplementary, and its possibilities for conveying meanings are limited to simple recognition. However, experts have been using the alphabet of smells to convey emotional messages from ancient times to date. The assessment of the role of odors in the modern world became possible due to the Covid-19 pandemic which often involved the loss, change or intensification of the sense of smell. In the course of the study 250 cases were considered, representing the stories associated with the disease and deviations in the perception of odors. The loss of the perception of unpleasant odors makes it impossible to learn about the dangers which cannot be perceived visually like in ancient times (spoiled food, poisoned air, etc.). Phantom interpretation of odors is often unpleasant: people can identify the smells of burning, ammonia, acetone, decomposition, feces, and others, and sometimes the excessiveness of an ordinary smell is unpleasant as well. The change of sign recognition can cause serious consequences for people. Phantom unpleasant odors can result in changes in eating habits and cause problems in communication. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Social Distancing During the Pandemic: A Semiotic Approach to Organizational Response through Commercial Branding

Social distancing is one of the most practical and most widely emphasized non-pharmaceutical interventions recommended globally in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Even though its efficacy remains debatable, social distancing continues to be advocated as a strategy to "flatten the curve” by reducing individual infections. This study aims to decode the semiotics of COVID-19 pandemic from one side and to show how commercial branding transformations took place from another. Global organizations have aligned themselves with social distancing precautions by adapting their commercial branding for visual messaging. This study takes a semiotic approach to the commercial branding of companies that could transform their branding during the pandemic and those that did. The two questions addressed by the study are: (1) How did commercial branding transform during the COVID-19 pandemic, and (2) what semiotic codes are evident in these transformations? The findings show that organizational branding was separated or reworded or took a two-pronged approach (combining rewording and transformed images). © 2023 World Journal of English Language.

Signifying dissent: The sensory semiotics of protest

Public protests need to communicate their aims to an audience, and the audience must make sense of the message. Initially this article was planned as a visual analysis of protest signs and placards. But to avoid ‘reproduc[ing] the privileged position of sight and vision over other ways of knowing', we attend to the contested relations between signification, power, and all the senses. The sounds, smells, sights, tastes, and textures found at protests by groups such as Extinction Rebellion, Occupy, and the gilets jaunes, and on issues including women's rights, nuclear power, immigration detention, Covid-19 lockdowns and vaccination mandates. Through ethnographic documentation of protests and the ‘live' coverage broadcast in social and news media, our investigation of activities, scenes, signs, and participants reveals, firstly, that public dissent communicates through multiple sensory dimensions, and, secondly, that the senses of street-based protests are inextricably intertwined with sensory control tactics used against protesters in the policing of events. © The Author(s) 2023.

Every corona is not a virus: a semiotic analysis of Coronavirus memetic humour

This study is a visual semiotic analysis of Coronavirus memetic humour, aimed at ascertaining the implied meanings of selected Covid-19-related Facebook memes that stimulated virtual discourse among Nigerian netizens during the pandemic. The study adopts Visual Semiotics Theory and Encryption Theory of Humour to account for meanings derived from the presuppositional assumptions and shared sociocultural knowledge which serve as the decrypting ‘key' to meaning. The ‘key' activates the appropriate disambiguation and interpretation of the significations in the semiotic resources conveyed in the humorous memes. Nineteen Facebook Covid-19-related memes were selected as a representative sample for a descriptive and qualitative analysis. The analysis is coded into 11 discourse domains based on the related semiotic contents of the memes which include: preventive protocol, media reportage, religious beliefs, health sector, sociopolitical domain, socioeconomic domain, security, science, transportation, relationship and lifestyle to account for the differentials in perceptions by Nigerian netizens. Findings show that Nigerians created Coronavirus memetic humour to stimulate laughter in the rather consequential circumstances generated by the pandemic derived from the humorous contents of the image macros. In the Nigerian social context, the Coronavirus memes humorously instantiate the apprehension and helplessness of a people, and thrive to express protest, insecurity, corruption, religiosity, economic hardship and a poor health system. These, altogether, combine as a myriad of the challenges faced by the people who consolably devised coping strategies to trivialise the pandemic, while yearning for an inclusive government that prioritises the welfare of its citizens © 2023, European Journal of Humour Research.All Rights Reserved

Health communication and socio-cultural behavioural change in respect to COVID-19 in South Africa

The Coronavirus pandemic in South Africa resulted in negative effects with high infection rates, health care shortages, increases in death rates, plus a collapsing economy. There was an urgent need for precautionary health promotional campaigns to educate populations about the virus. However, with South Africa's diverse population cultural beliefs, sociocultural aspects needed to be catered for. Health literacy also had to be considered for effective positive behaviour change patterns to occur. Social barriers such as misinformation, stigma, myths, anxiety and prejudice resulted into infodemics emerging in the population. Media representation about the pandemic needed to ensure truthful and authentic information reached target audiences. Specific examples related to religious beliefs (the Chief Justice Mogeng Mogeng) and cultural remedies (Madagascar's artemisia or "green gold") are included in this chapter, to elaborate examples of such cases in South Africa, with no audience engagement analysed. Two health promotional campaigns, Count Me In and We will beat this are analysed via a qualitative multimodal analysis. Behaviour change communication theories are included to triangulate and validate the findings. Findings indicated that health campaigns need to cater for socio-cultural diversities and be audience specific in order for adequate behaviour change to occur, via clear health messages. © 2022 by Sabihah Moola.

Masking morality in the making: how China's anti-epidemic promotional videos present facemask as a techno-moral mediator

The spread of Covid-19 has made facemask a critical artifact for people all over the world. Mediating between (non-)wearers and their environment, facemask makes people aware of a set of morally relevant distinctions and sometimes forces decisions on them. In fact, the semiotics of "facemask in use” largely shapes the parameters for human practice and experience in the epidemic. Drawing on the techno-moral mediation concept [Verbeek, 2008. "Obstetric Ultrasound and the Technological Mediation of Morality: A Postphenomenological Analysis.” Human Studies 31 (1): 11–26], we explore how anti-epidemic promotional videos released by Chinese authorities build facemask-related narratives in the Covid-19 epidemic. Findings reveal that "facemask in use” links people's "smaller love” for family to a "bigger love” for Chinese people in general;transforms an individual to member of a large group of commoner-turned-protectors;or marks the military's loyalty and obedience to the Party-State, which makes possible the "Chinese speed” in saving lives. We add to extant literature by unraveling an entanglement between the moralization of facemask-wearing and China's traditional values, social institutions and media newsroom culture about disaster coverage. This scrutiny into the "face-masking morality in the making” implies that the power to frame the cultural significance of facemask induces an alternative mode of techno-moral change, which may outlast the epidemic itself.

UK street art and the meaning of masks during the COVID-19 pandemic, 2020-21

This paper contributes to social and cultural geographies of the COVID-19 pandemic through an exploration of the role of UK street art in documenting the remarkable shifts in the practice of wearing facemasks, the tensions and emotions involved, and the transformations in the meaning of facemasks during the pandemic. Street art has become an important outlet for political critique and social engagement, capturing the public mood in response to policies and recommendations attempting to stem viral transmission, including the requirement to wear facemasks in some public places. Drawing primarily on image analysis of street artworks produced during 2020 and sourced using online search tools, and qualitative interviews with UK street artists in 2020 and 2021, the paper first explores the changing geographies and politics of street art during the pandemic. It then examines the ways in which street art portrays mask-wearing simultaneously as reassuring, protective and fear-inducing, and reflects the meaning of masks in relation to protecting public health, managing anxieties concerning health risks, boosting morale, and symbolising solidarity and public spiritedness. The paper argues that pandemic street art contributes to public dialogue by articulating emotion and deeply held concerns, and communicating the intimate politics, semiotic meanings and social properties of objects associated with disease.

Kinetic intensities and moral registers of pandemic place branding

Emblematic of late capitalist modes of value creation, place branding draws on semiotic processes as well as on affective mobilization both to structure the representation and fruition of specific locales and to produce publics. Such governmental projects of people and places, however, are always open to possible acts of recontextualization. This article discusses the complex forms of social and semiotic regimentation (and subver-sion) underlying place-branding projects by exploring two social media campaigns that involved the city of Milan during two key moments of the Covid-19 outbreak. Revolving around different moral discourses of speed, both campaigns resulted in a partial or failed uptake. The initial (February 2020) celebration of fast-paced metropolitan work eth-ics evoked by #MilanoNonSiFerma (‘Milan doesn't stop') – a marketing and political faux pas – was followed (in May 2020) by a reparatory campaign #UnPassoAllaVolta (‘One step at a time'), aimed at endorsing the meditative quality of slow temporality. These morally inflected shifts in kinetic intensity materialized alternative forms of ethical sociality and disciplinary practices, showing how the semiotic regimentation of affects through moral registers and chronotopic formulations plays a key role within the fusion of media and capital characteristic of our post-Fordist present. © 2023, EQUINOX PUBLISHING.

The Language of Smell: Code Failure

In today's world filled with complex signs and symbols, visual and auditory channels are the most intensive in semiotic terms. The language of smell, associated with the most ancient reactions, is usually considered as secondary and supplementary, and its possibilities for conveying meanings are limited to simple recognition. However, experts have been using the alphabet of smells to convey emotional messages from ancient times to date. The assessment of the role of odors in the modern world became possible due to the Covid-19 pandemic which often involved the loss, change or intensification of the sense of smell. In the course of the study 250 cases were considered, representing the stories associated with the disease and deviations in the perception of odors. The loss of the perception of unpleasant odors makes it impossible to learn about the dangers which cannot be perceived visually like in ancient times (spoiled food, poisoned air, etc.). Phantom interpretation of odors is often unpleasant: people can identify the smells of burning, ammonia, acetone, decomposition, feces, and others, and sometimes the excessiveness of an ordinary smell is unpleasant as well. The change of sign recognition can cause serious consequences for people. Phantom unpleasant odors can result in changes in eating habits and cause problems in communication. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

The role of language in place branding during the Covid-19 pandemic and post-lockdowns: An introduction

The articles in this issue examine the transformations and adaptations of place branding during the Covid-19 pandemic and post-lockdowns. Using five case studies, they examine how Covid-19 has changed place branding in Italy, Brazil, Japan, the Philippines, and France during different stages of the pandemic. The articles explore questions concerning how to (re)brand a global viral hotspot;the interplay of Covid-19, place branding and tourism;populism, nation (re)building and Covid-19 management;as well as the political nature and impact of place branding such as nation-building and nationalism during the Covid-19 pandemic and in a post-lockdown world. The articles examine place branding as semiotics with respect to how campaigns are entextualized and re-contextualized. They focus on tropes such as morality, fun, (lack of) mobility, and the future/time. Overall, this issue argues that Covid-19 is an event for place branding and that new tropes are likely to continue to emerge and endure. © 2023, EQUINOX PUBLISHING.

Neuroscience, Neuroaesthetics, Semiotics and Effective Communication of COVID-19 Warning Information

The need to indicate the significant adverse effects of COVID-19 and the behaviour desired from the population to address this offer an excellent context to consider the varied approaches to providing such information. More specifically, it offers the opportunity to consider the potential utility of neuroscience and what could be usefully added when thinking about the design and presentation of warnings and information. With the understandable wish to neutralise the threat of the COVID-19 pandemic, countries have been displaying miscellaneous messages against the spread of SARS-CoV-2, perhaps some with untested assumptions that those messages would be effective. Despite this, there seems to be highly variable effectiveness in conveying protective messages. Primary causes of poor compliance with various preventive messages might involve a lack of clear vision and direction if the aim is to change citizens' responsibility for their behaviour, consistency of such changes, and people having confidence in the information they are presented with. It would seem beneficial, in terms of effectiveness, for information presentation to be tailored to target community groups and for this to come from the governments or authorities after determining achievable practical interventions, understanding the citizen's perceptions of the messages and how science, and particularly neuroscience, shows that the words in language alter behaviour. Last and not least, this allows suitable stylistic consistency to be applied to aid with messaging efficiency and recognisability. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Remaking time: Cultural semiotic transformations of temporality during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown.

This paper investigates one aspect of meaning making that occurs in the wake of systemic change. It addresses the question of how time is re-configured by socio-material changes resultant from the COVID-19 pandemic. Employing a semiotic perspective, we aim to describe a process of disruption and distress, which leads to a recognition of the oddness of 'covid-time.' This is characterised by distressing 'suspended waiting', a despairing frozen temporality. After this, this odd covid-time is semiotically assimilated into the old and familiar. Distressing 'suspended time' is transformed into 'productive time', 'normal time', and 'transformational time' as an attempt to regulate affect. By highlighting this semiotic shift, the theory of the Cultural Psychology of Semiotic Dynamics (Valsiner, 2014) is used to highlight how meaning is constructed using cultural resources.

Exploring relationship among semiotic product packaging, brand experience dimensions, brand trust and purchase intentions in an Asian emerging market

Purpose>Over recent years, brand semiotics have been gaining the marketing practitioners' attention for designing their brand strategy. Hence, to address this gap, the current study investigates the effect of semiotic product packaging on brand experience dimensions, brand trust and purchase intent of reputed major brands of fast-moving consumer good (FMCG) products.Design/methodology/approach>The data for this study were collected by administering a questionnaire-based survey from 254 respondents from the Delhi National Capital Region (NCR) of India, using systematic sampling. Structural equation modeling has been used to test the conceptual model and examine the hypotheses developed in the study.Findings>The results present evidence of the growing influence of semiotic product packaging upon consumer brand trust and purchase intentions. The study suggests that brand semiotics positively influence customer brand experience, brand trust and purchase intention of FMCG products.Practical implications>The research findings will benefit FMCG companies to identify how to apply semiotics in packaging to improve consumers' brand experience and influence intent to purchase.Originality/value>Research in brand semiotics on product packaging is limited, as most prior studies focus on brand semiotics in advertising, product design improvement and retail design. The present study has investigated the impact of semiotics on brand experience dimensions in product packaging, which is emerging as a critical concern for the FMCG sector particularly in the post-COVID period.