Publications
Publication details [#48622]
Pym, Anthony and Bei Hu. 2022. Trust and Cooperation through Social Media: covid-19 translations for Chinese communities in Melbourne. In Lee, Tong King and Dingkun Wang, eds. Translation and Social Media Communication in the Age of the Pandemic. London: Routledge. pp. 44–61. URL
Publication type
Chapter in book
Publication language
English
Abstract
A pandemic calls for behaviour-change communication. In the case of superdiverse cites, this entails significant translation and mediation across languages and media, since cooperative actions are to no avail if they do not occur in all sections of society. Messages thus have to attract high degrees of trustworthiness. Social media are sites of particular turbulence in this respect for several reasons: (1) They are privileged media for the circulation of dissent; (2) social-media users have high indices of media-comparison behaviour, judging information on one medium in terms of another, thus exhibiting low levels of initial trust; and (3) linguistically diverse communities have electronic media in their first language coming from outside the immediate community, potentially entering into conflict with officially generated and translated information. This chapter looks at social media use in Melbourne in order to identify instances of trust and distrust in translated pandemic information across several media. The authors assess the consequences for cooperative behaviour.
Source : Based on publisher information