Vicari Stefania, Murru Maria Francesca
The University of Sheffield, UK.
The University of Bergamo, Italy.
Soc Media Soc. 2020 Jul 30;6(3):2056305120948254. doi: 10.1177/2056305120948254. eCollection 2020 Jul.
On 22 February 2020, 11 municipalities in Northern Italy became the first COVID-19 red zone of Europe. Two days later, when it became evident that the virus had been spreading in the country for weeks, Italy entered a "buffer zone," a temporal zone between normality and pandemic. The buffer zone lasted around 2 weeks and thrived with irony flowing on social media through memes, multimedia remixes, and jokes. As a collective ritual, irony allowed people to temporarily background the mounting feelings of bewilderment and uncertainty by foregrounding the familiar scripts of playful and grassroots expressivity typical of networked publics. While giving the country a way to breathe before grieving, irony delivered both traditional political satire and new symbolic arrangements to frame "us" versus "them": Northern Italy versus Southern Italy, Italy versus China. We advance initial reflections on irony and its functions during what we call Italy's COVID-19 buffer zone and argue for the need of more platform research interested in how users appropriate devices and vernaculars in ways that are culturally bound. In other words, can we rethink "The Platform" (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, Instagram) as a constellation of small-world-platforms-sometimes overlapping, other times segregating-each shaped by local hopes and fears, histories and events?
2020年2月22日，意大利北部的11个市镇成为欧洲首个新冠疫情“红色区域”。两天后，当病毒已在该国传播数周这一情况变得明显时，意大利进入了一个“缓冲地带”，这是一个介于正常状态和大流行之间的临时区域。缓冲地带持续了大约两周，社交媒体上充斥着通过表情包、多媒体混音和笑话传播的讽刺意味。作为一种集体仪式，讽刺使人们能够通过突出网络公众所特有的轻松有趣和草根表达的熟悉模式，暂时将日益增加的困惑和不确定感置于次要位置。在让国家在悲痛之前得以喘息的同时，讽刺既传递了传统的政治讽刺，也形成了新的象征格局来界定“我们”与“他们”：意大利北部与意大利南部、意大利与中国。我们对在我们所称的意大利新冠疫情缓冲地带期间的讽刺及其作用进行了初步思考，并主张需要开展更多关于平台的研究，关注用户如何以受文化限制的方式运用各种工具和方言。换句话说，我们能否将“平台”（如推特、脸书、照片墙）重新思考为一个由小世界平台组成的集合体——这些平台有时重叠，有时分离——每个平台都由当地的希望与恐惧、历史与事件塑造？
