ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 on ‘The Infodemic Switch: Subversive Communication’ explains how infodemic as the rapid spread of excessive quantity of mis/disinformation threatens to make the classical tenets of ideal communication – reliability, credibility, trust and relevance – irrelevant. Its implications for governing in crisis times is also explained in terms of (virtual) platform politics of social networking sites and social media. There is specific focus on the role of the tech giants which exert overwhelming oligopolistic control over information flows. The analysis combines the key findings of academic research, advisories of transnational organisations and policy documents of various civil society organisations to reveal how coronavirus becomes a hyper-active source of numerous mis/disinformation, with far-reaching economic, commercial, political, social and cultural impacts with cross-boundary impact. The chapter also mentions some possible countermeasures against infodemic but goes on to make yet another provocative argument that both social media and of information technology, two prime tools of informational capitalism, by their very constitutive logics retain the possibility of manoeuvring infodemic in their own interest, at least for the time being.
