Fighting COVID-19 with the team of 5 million: Aotearoa New Zealand government communication during the 2020 lockdown

Beattie, Alex; Priestley, Rebecca

doi:10.1016/j.ssaho.2021.100209

Cited by 30 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…In Aotearoa New Zealand, public communications about the COVID-19 pandemic initially came from daily brie ngs from the Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and the Director-General of Health Ashley Bloom eld, supported by a government communications campaign (Beattie and Priestley, 2021). But direct communication by scientists such as Wiles, along with others such as epidemiologist Professor Michael Baker, public health expert Dr Ayesha Verrall, and COVID-19 modellers Professors Shaun Hendy and Michael Plank, also played a key role in educating New Zealanders, and then the world, about COVID-19.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Going viral: a science communication collaboration in the era of COVID-19 and social media

Wiles

Morris

Priestley

2022

Preprint

Self Cite

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On 9 March 2020, two days before the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, microbiologist and infectious diseases expert Associate Professor Siouxsie Wiles released the first output from her collaboration with cartoonist Toby Morris: an animated GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) known as ‘Flatten the Curve’. The graphic went viral on Twitter with over 10 million impressions in three days. Flatten the Curve was the first of more than 70 graphics produced by the Wiles and Morris collaboration, all designed as accessible visual communication about COVID-19. The graphics, all released under a Creative Commons CC-BY-SA-4.0 license, have been translated into multiple languages, used by communities, politicians, and public health officials around the world, and the collaborators have won multiple awards for their work.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Going viral: a science communication collaboration in the era of COVID-19 and social media

Wiles

Morris

Priestley

2022

Preprint

Self Cite

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“…Most importantly, as shown by Elena Semino, we see that ‘a well-informed and context-sensitive approach to metaphor selection can be an important part of public health messaging’ (2021, 56). The Aotearoa New Zealand government’s presentation of lockdown ‘as a collective and meaningful cause’ has been considered by researchers (Beattie and Priestley 2021, 7), and some of its negative connotations have been touched on in relation to bubble (Trnka and Davies 2020, 172), but the function of lockdown as a metaphor has received insufficient attention. There has been some research on the effectiveness and limitations of bubble as a metaphor that depicts ‘households as sites of responsibility and care’ (Trnka and Davies 2020, 167); its function as a spatial metaphor in shaping an elimination narrative in response to COVID-19 (Kearns 2021, 327; Appleton 2020) and its meaning in relation to colonialism and capitalism (Manderson and Veracini 2020).…”

Section: “I Am Fascinated By Metaphors and Thinking About The ‘Bubble...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This range within the term lockdown enabled Kiwis to conceptualise a threat arriving from outside—outside the country, outside the home—as well as threat that comes from within—within the community, stemming from each other. By blending the hard associations of prison lockdowns with the protective elements of a school lockdown and tempering both with the message that the level 4 lockdown was ‘a collective and meaningful cause’ (Beattie and Priestley 2021, 7), a necessary response to a threat rather than the direct wielding of biopower, health officials offered the public a clear sense of what a lockdown entailed while garnering large-scale support.…”

Section: ‘New Zealand Goes Into Lockdown’ (Twitter User 2 2020)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These enforced stay-at-home measures constituted a highly visible form of biopolitics, reinvigorating debate over citizen’s rights and the extent to which governments can—or should—exert control over the bodies of individuals (Agamben 1998, 122). As such, despite the framing by government officials of self-isolation as ‘a collective and meaningful cause’, and ‘the COVID-19 virus as an obstacle that required collective buy-in to overcome’, not all Kiwis wished to ‘buy-in’ (Beattie and Priestley 2021, 7). While only four lockdown tweets in our corpus expressed full opposition to government measures, on conducting a check of 800 further March 2020 tweets, the themes discussed below were repeated in the lone 12 tweets—1.5%—which were found to oppose government stay-at-home measures.…”

Section: Biopower: ‘Imprisoning Entire Population In Homes Is Inhuman...mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Bubbles and lockdown in Aotearoa New Zealand: the language of self-isolation in #Covid19NZ tweets

Burnette

Long

2022

Med Humanities

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In March 2020, as cases of COVID-19 were found in Aotearoa New Zealand, the government moved to eliminate community transmission of the virus through self-isolation. During this month, as the population discussed if, when and how households would be asked to stay at home, terms such as lockdown—the state of (national) closure—and bubble—the household isolating together—became common parts of everyday conversation.In this article, we blend quantitative and qualitative research methodologies from corpus linguistics, literary studies and the medical humanities to compare the affective range of the terms lockdown and bubble as they were used in tweets containing the hashtag #Covid19NZ. Both lockdown and bubble are metaphors of containment that provided different ways of understanding and engaging with government stay-at-home measures by highlighting and minimising different aspects of the event. We found that while the strong, prison connotations of lockdown were reflected in discussions of the measure as a tough form of control exercised from above, the lighter associations of the term bubble led to the perception of this measure as more malleable and conducive to exertion of individual control. Yet, although the seemingly restrictive range of lockdown made it a useful term for the expression of negative affect, the term was actually more frequently used with neutral or unclear affect to share information. Conversely, while bubble tweets expressed more positive sentiment, humour and support towards government stay-at-home measures, this rendered the term surprisingly restrictive in its potential uses: its lightness makes it an effective way to limit the expression of antilockdown sentiment. As Kiwi Twitter users faced the uncertainty of the first COVID-19 lockdown, the pre-existing connotations of the metaphors used to frame stay-at-home measures also helped frame their own experiences of these measures.

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“…This requires a greater level of accessibility than is currently available. By way of comparison, the exceptional clarity of communication in New Zealand around the Covid-19 pandemic, and the reporting of data in an accessible way for the public to understand and relate to, is heralded as an essential factor in the success of their early elimination campaign [Beattie & Priestley, 2021]. In contrast, ocean climate data is not easy for non-specialists to find and view: it is either not publicly available or is locked behind a technical file format; graphical visualisations of data often use complex language and discipline-specific charts; and scientific presentation of data on its own often lacks a personally relevant 'so what?'…”

Section: Creative Immersionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Our Ocean Climate Story: connecting communities with local data

Cole¹,

Savoie²,

Carson³

2022

JCOM

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The ocean has a vast capacity for absorbing heat and carbon dioxide, seriously threatening local habitats for marine life. Challenges in connecting wider society with this crisis may originate in its poor visibility for non-specialists: the data can be inaccessible and hard to relate to. In a series of immersive community workshops, participants created artworks combining recent physical ocean climate data recorded in Otago, New Zealand, with impacts on local species from published studies. We found that crafting visual stories was a powerful way to distill greater meaning from complex climate data, and engage participants with harmful changes underway locally.

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Fighting COVID-19 with the team of 5 million: Aotearoa New Zealand government communication during the 2020 lockdown

Cited by 30 publications

References 29 publications

Going viral: a science communication collaboration in the era of COVID-19 and social media

Going viral: a science communication collaboration in the era of COVID-19 and social media

Bubbles and lockdown in Aotearoa New Zealand: the language of self-isolation in #Covid19NZ tweets

Our Ocean Climate Story: connecting communities with local data

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