Online on Zoom Meeting ID 563 610 6271

Abstract

As the first wave of Covid-19 virus spread across the world, content alignment of news stories could be observed both within and between media sources. During December 2019 and February 2020, Covid-19 news stories were, outside China, interspersed with news coverage of other events (e.g., Hong Kong protests, Iranian–American confrontation, Trump impeachment). As the virus spread across Europe and America, news media front pages focused almost exclusively on the pandemic, all news sections (politics, business, sports, and arts) related to Covid-19, and breaking news became _corona news_ in continuously updated media. From the perspective of cultural dynamics, the Covid-19 pandemic provides a natural experiment that allows us to study the effect of global catastrophe on the the dynamics of news media's information. While news media are neither unbiased nor infallible as sources of events, they do reflect preferences, values, and desires of a wide sociocultural and political user spectrum. As such, news media coverage of Covid-19 can be used as a proxy for how cultural information systems respond to unexpected and dangerous events. In this study we combine latent variable modeling and information theory in order to show how printed news media respond to a catastrophe that is characterized by social and natural factors. Specifically, we propose the principle of News Information Decoupling (NID), which states that as a response to unexpected and dangerous temporally extended events, the ordinary information dynamics of news media are (initially) decoupled such that the content novelty decreases as media focus monotonically on the catastrophic event, but the resonant property of said content increases as the its continued relevance propagate throughout the news information system.    

About the speaker

Kristoffer Laigaard, Nielbo, Associate Professor
Head of Center for Humanities Computing Aarhus
Interacting Minds Centre
School of Culture and Society