The semiotics of the anti-COVID-19 mask

Abstract

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.

‘Generic visuals’ of Covid-19 in the news: Invoking banal belonging through symbolic reiteration

“…A small number of other scholars have also started to document and examine how various types of simple data visualizations – like, for example, bar charts, line charts, choropleth maps, but also, more broadly, diagrams – speak to audiences in different ways ( Amit-Danhi and Shifman, 2018 ; Ledin and Machin, 2018 ; Weber et al, 2018 ). As already noted, we are also interested in this question of how audiences are brought into being, assembled as publics ( Marres, 2007 ; Warner, 2002 ) in our research into generic visuals. It is easy enough to understand how iconic photographs or splashy visuals like the famous New York Times piece ‘Snowfall’ might do this work of public assemblage; the role of visual wallpaper in public life is less clear.…”

“…Likewise, she adds that the flatten-the-curve line graph has become widespread in part because it is an especially simplified visual rendition of the complex epidemiological relationship between social distancing measures (or lack thereof) and hospitalization rates over time. Alongside the coronavirus image and the flatten-the-curve graph, the face mask has become a ubiquitous visual that stands for the 'new normal', that is, the medicalization of everyday life (Leone, 2021). Images of people wearing face masks in a variety of settingshospitals, airports and schools, but also supermarkets, parks, and city streetshave become the norm in news media, pointing both to the particular moment in history that we are living and the universal nature of the pandemic.…”

Leadership In Time of Crisis: The COVID-19 Pandemic in Japan and Reflections for Malaysia

“…The Japanese tradition and culture might play a more influential role in containing the virus in the early stage. 94 Since COVID-19 is transmitted through droplets mostly from our mouth when we speak or sneeze, it is essential to wear a mask or keep a safety distance from the others to avoid the contact of flying droplets (airborne disease). Therefore, the Japanese culture of greetings that do not favour physical contact, their preference of bowing instead of handshakes, and their habits of wearing face mask whenever they feel uncomfortable during winter are more convincing explanations for why the COVID-19 did not spread widely during the early to mid-2020.…”

Identity, lifestyle, and face-mask branding: A social semiotic multimodal discourse analysis

“…Only few studies focus on the meaning potentials of face-masks, and how they are used to perform cultural identities. For example, Leone’s (2021) study of the anti-COVID-19 mask developed a cultural semiotics of the medical mask in the West and discussed the evolving functions of face-masks from “traumatic medical intervention on and in the body” to a sign of “potential contagion by the environment” (p. 1). Another attempt to explore the semiotics of face-masks is Ho (2021), who investigated how the practice of wearing face-masks indexes cultural identities in YouTube videos and gave an example of Chinese learners from “western” countries filming videos in Chinese as a means to align themselves with “East Asian” face-mask cultures.…”