Introduction

The Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted the social, economic, political and cultural lives of individuals and communities around the world, creating a ‘new normal’. The loss of innumerable lives and livelihoods, the challenge of caregiving and the mental and physical toll of the pandemic have significantly altered the way people understand and experience their lives. The precarities faced by contractual labour in the informal economy or that by the ill-equipped medical fraternity have been exposed by this pandemic. Revisiting McLuhan’s understanding of a ‘global village’ in times of the Covid-19 pandemic, it can be argued that the co-dependency between different geographies coexists with tensions in transnational flows of people, commerce and culture. With much of social, economic and political life moving online during the pandemic, social media has been a critical space for crisis information sharing, connecting and learning. Simultaneously, it has been a source of fake news as well as government propaganda.