2020 THE YEAR THAT WASN’T

UTOPIAN PANDEMICS, HEALTH SURVEILLANCE & TENDER BREATHING

1898. A Dutch botanist Martinus Beijerinck crushed up the leaves of a diseased plant and passed its sap through a filter. The filtrate—that matter passed through the filter, still infected healthy plants. This infective agent could not be grown on a culture medium or killed using chemical or heat treatments. It wasn’t a toxin. Astonishing, it multiplied; it could grow and reproduce only within living cells. Beijernick called this agent a VIRUS (Latin for POISON).

1898. Friedrich Loeffler and Paul Frosch found the virus responsible for foot-and-mouth disease in animals.

1901. Yellow Fever was recognized as the first human viral disease.

HUMANS DO NOT UNDERSTAND VIRUSES.

PORTALS to UTOPIA

STRANGE & CURIOUS TIMES

Reflecting on this historic moment, I turn to novelist Arundhati Roy’s public writing in The Financial Times (2020), The Pandemic is a Portal:

Roy’s image of “dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred…” gives me pause.

Breathe. Exhale. I need to breathe. I have witnessed many people around the world responding to this crisis with dead ideas, on a war-path unprepared for change. From COVID-19’s relentlessly anti-social logic, I appreciate the persistent demand to rethink failed market dogma. I want people to imagine a better world. I want to inspire and work among people to create and craft a new world.

We will never return to what was. We can only move forward. I am convinced that without deep contemplation and reflection as individuals and institutions, we most certainly will drag dead ideas and dead values with us.

HOLDING SPACE

What does it mean to hold space for someone else? It means that you are willing to walk alongside another person in whatever journey they’re on without judging them, making them feel inadequate, trying to fix them or trying to impact the outcome. If you’ve ever listened quietly and compassionately to a friend while they shared their sorrows, you were holding space. Holding space requires an open and flexible mind.

When we hold space for other people, we open our hearts, offer unconditional support and let go of judgment and control. There are no magic words. You can HELP others when you know how to confidently HOLD SPACE. Listen with your whole heart and your open mind. Withhold judgment. Your steadfast, compassionate presence is the greatest gift. Many people learn how to hold space as a result of loss, grief or melancholia. And the practice is valuable in your everyday life. I urge you to practice holding tender space for others.

QUESTIONS

What does it mean to you, to hold space?

Have you held space for others? When? What did you learn from the experience?

What do you make of the Radical Tenderness Manifesto?

Are you able to invite radical tenderness into your life?

What other examples of performance or poetry, art, or extravagance are you drawn to for comfort and tenderness?

What else in your life offers you tenderness?

Have you witnessed a moment of radical tenderness? Can you describe this moment?

Does your embodiment of radical tenderness impact your breathing? How? Why?

With whom can you discuss your responses to this material?

YOUR ATTENTION IS YOUR KINGDOM

This is a course about media. About media languages.

This is also a course about you –as life-long learners, readers, consumers & citizens. You get to decide where to direct your ATTENTION.

How do you pay ATTENTION?

In 2020 all humans seem to be connected by a global pandemic. Media messages about current public health issues are difficult to ignore or avoid. Most of these messages stress the challenges and negative associations now present and part of daily life. Media institutions stir the public into a fury of opposition: mask or no mask? social distancing or physical isolation? individual or community? Numbers to identify the dead and degree of infection. There are no feel-good stories here.

COVID-19 & ITS METAPHORS

The views put forward across public media channels follow the patterns of civilization and its responses to disease and illness. Do we create diseases for ourselves? Are we victims of a world we cannot control? Is COVID-19 a result of human exploitation of our planet.

Sontag warns about the impact of language of disease and negative attitudes of yesteryear that influence our current understanding.

PREPOSTEROUS and DANGEROUS views manage to put the ONUS of the disease on the patient and not only WEAKEN the patient’s ability to understand the range of plausible MEDICAL TREATMENT but also, implicitly, direct the patient away from such treatment (47).

The metaphors of disease are myths. It is fantasy to imagine escape from fatality. COVID-19 ascents into mythologizing as a vehicle for larger cultural insufficiencies. Sontag appropriately identifies troubles of humanity that rely on the myth-makings of COVID-19 to shield public attention:

for our shallow attitude toward DEATH, for our anxieties about FEELING, for our reckless improvident responses to our real problems of GROWTH, for our inability to construct an advanced industrial society that properly regulates CONSUMPTION, and for our justified fears of the increasingly VIOLENT course of history (87).

Susan Sontag, in Illness as Metaphor (1978) and her follow-up essay, AIDS and its Metaphors (1988), precisely connect the value of language and meaning with the course of history. Have media messages been appropriate FOR YOU?

QUESTION

How have you managed COVID-19?

With whom have you isolated?

What kinds of conversations took place?

BREATHING

Let’s take a moment and reflect on the current state of the world. I don’t think I’d be doing an excellent job if I didn’t invite this moment. We need a global PAUSE.

We cannot ignore all the media messages about COVID-19. Sometimes, you may feel the natural temptation to hold your breath. As we PAUSE, I invite you to join me in the following task: BREATH. Breathing is a powerful activity. Although the body will take in breath involuntarily, humans can also control their breath, making breathing a voluntary action.

BREATH

Stand up. Ground yourself firmly on the floor by relaxing the soles of your feet. Standing very tall, broaden your collarbones and slide your shoulder blades down your back. Soften the hollows of your throat and mouth, relax all your face muscles, even the spaces under your cheeks. Breathe naturally through your nose, relaxing your lips and tongue. Remember, the nose’s primary responsibility is to smell and to breathe. Then, slowly breathe in and feel the breath working its way through your body. Breathe in through your nose, feel the breath in your throat, your chest, belly, waist, knees and toes.

This is a four-part breath. Inhale four counts hold your breath four counts, exhale four counts and pause before you inhale four counts again. Repeat four times.

QUESTIONS

Do you know if you hold your BREATH?

What is your experience or relationship with your BREATH?

Do you enjoy the invitation to BREATHE?

What things trigger you to PAUSE?

How might conscious BREATHING support your goals for a changed world?

Have you enjoyed this PAUSE and BREATH?

ADDITIONAL directions for improving BREATHING HABITS are included at the end of this TOPIC.

POSSIBLE FUTURES

This pandemic is a horror. Recovery will challenge the best of us. To prevent future losses (more death), measures begin to form, plans hatched, and containment strategies fail to account for all. Nonetheless, now is the time for RADICAL THINKING. Time again, the world shakes from disasters only to recoil, almost as quickly as disaster hits.

Both world wars produced a genuine conviction that the violence ended; there simply must be lasting peace. Afterwards. But how would a renewed global system run this new world order? By the end of the Cold War, any imagined future was recognized realpolitik –the German expression for contextual diplomacy in place of any ethical or moral political ideology.

Capitalism and democracy, consumerism and materialism—are these included in your UTOPIAN VISION? What could go wrong? A tangible and ubiquitous experience of healthcare horrors and apocalyptic futures is upon us.

What are your horrors? Where are your dark nightmares? Always somewhere or someplace else, the calamities of environmental damage, climate emergency, refugee crises and poverty—there are so many more, as a constant daily display on @Insta or the social media currently open on your smartphone. Our human inability to see beyond our sightline is apparent when the world warns of toilet paper scarcity.

Now, COVID-19 seems less subject to cultural relativism. COVID-19 does not discriminate. There are no natural human divisions that save one over another. All humans are vulnerable to this inherent problem. Especially when contagion and transmission are spread so easily. Who are or who should be responsible for the health of humans? Standard answers point to some nation/state response to direct community/individual action.

In today’s health crisis, nationhood is meaningless. If COVID-19 is universal, its treatment and subsequent care are local. Who will you turn to for help? I acknowledge my feelings of sympathy, anxiety and sheer pain for people who are suffering. Still, when I map my mobilities in the last few months, I am surprised by my psychogeography’s smallness. Health emergencies always exaggerate the hyperlocal.

UTOPIAN VISIONS

You were invited to read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death.

For Neil Postman, considering the imaginary world of science fiction helps a culture understand its basic values, assumptions and tendencies. Postman suggested the UTOPIAN vision presented by Huxley was a more accurate prediction than Orwell’s. Do you agree? Why or why not?

UTOPIA/DYSTOPIA

What is a utopia and why should I care? With our present situation, EVERYTHING has CHANGED. As thinkers begin proposing how human affairs should be run after COVID-19, I encourage you to consider this great opportunity of the present – NOW – to apply practical applications to your world to create your future. What changes would you like to see? What is your UTOPIAN VISION for life after COVID-19?

The singularity of any UTOPIAN VISION spells disaster. All UTOPIAS are DYSTOPIAS.

The idea of utopia/dystopia represents imaginary societies where people live either in a perfect environment governed by equitable rules to support everyone or in an oppressive society ruled by a repressive and controlling state. When I imagine the possibility of a perfect environment, my imagination quickly turns dark. How about you?

Visions of a perfect world are first recorded around 380 BCE when Plato’s political dialogue REPUBLIC gained influence. Plato’s utopian society describes an imagined ideal Greek city-state that provided a stable life for all of its citizens. Well, most of its citizens. At that time, hierarchical powers, patriarchy and slavery were part of everyday life. Not all inhabitants of Greece had citizen status. And thus, the darkness begins to unfold.

A general understanding of UTOPIA emerged in the 16th century, in the work of Thomas Moore (1516). Moore’s UTOPIAN VISIONS initiated an enormous wave of UTOPIAN thinking with ripples that continue to influence. Perhaps the most massive wave of UTOPIAN thinking and creativity is still to come? I suggest a UTOPIAN future for UTOPIAN thinking because COVID-19 pulls back the curtain onto CONDITIONS FOR POSSIBILITIES.

UTOPIAN categories begin to blur. Political revolutionaries dream of possible UTOPIAN futures: What is COMMUNISM or SOCIALISM, but UTOPIAN VISIONS? Dreamers continue to dream. DISNEY, MICKEY MOUSE & DONALD DUCK are UTOPIAN VISIONS. When worlds are created without an expansive vision of TIME, dreams quickly turn nightmarish.

How does one begin a UTOPIAN VISION?

The means of their creation – ecological, economic, political, religious, feminist, scientism and technologica are UTOPIA categories.

How does your UTOPIA begin?

Utopian Impulses, Utopian Realities

There will be no new global world order. We might find some useful advice, but the tendencies toward innovation, more technology or war are more likely. There’s an old tale that two of the best-selling books in history include the Bible and The Communist Manifesto. I hear an Agatha Christie mystery is also on this list. With all, the UTOPIAN IMPULSES will come and go like breath.

We really want to end poverty, fight against injustice, foster peace and gather the world as one community. The dream of a world without oppression, the fantasy of ending materialism—these are the stuff that tells the end of history.

The denigration of public discourse, as Neil Postman’s words attest, means that essential words like truth, liberty or justice don’t hold water. Public discourse makes explicit that order for one is complete and utter annihilation for another. Public discourse points out how good government is relative to those in power. Public discourse warns us to find peace by shutting in and through disengagement. Keep your public super small; proximal; walking-distance. That way, public discourse envelops you in your filter bubble. Other relevant words, like equity, diversity, inclusion and decolonization, are the stuff of fiction—maybe something good is on Netflix.

Is it true? There are no better alternatives to private enterprise, free markets and competitive economies. The Iron Lady (British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher) insisted this was the vision. No POSSIBLEFUTURES. The futility of technology, innovation and public discourse means no UTOPIAN IMPULSES result.

A better world may be ‘out there’ or ‘in your mind’ –what-have-you. UTOPIA, its etymology from Greek ‘ou’ + ‘topos’ or NOT + PLACE, literally means “no place.” Unrealistic. However, those committed to such UTOPIAN VISIONS often consider their dreams attainable.

DYSTOPIAN ENDS

I love a good disaster. Let me qualify, disaster fiction is one of my favourite conversations. Will the world end with fire or ice? I think ICE DEATH is imminently possible anytime I suffer from work stress. I love a good disaster movie or television series. Any recommendations?

Beyond dark stories of DYSTOPIC ENDS brought about by forced birthrights and class distinctions, state coercion strategies, self-harming coping mechanisms, new technologies for/of/on human brains, repressive social control systems, sexual repression and self-censorship, loss of freedoms (like speech or life), artificial human interactions or the consequences of utter destruction, the world still feels enormous. There are multiple universes. There, you might find UTOPIA.

QUESTIONS

Describe your UTOPIA.

What keeps you and your world from turning to darkness?

Are all UTOPIAS DISTOPIC?

Is there a future world that does not end in disaster?

ICE death or exploding ball of FIRE? Have you thought about DEATH?

How would you prefer to die? Why?

What’s your story?

Have you ever participated in shared conversation about death?

How did it go?

WAR OF OUR WORLDS

In just three months, the coronavirus has turned the world upside down. But how did it play out so quickly? Let’s take a closer look at COVID19 – from its origins in southeast Asia to its acceleration across Europe and North America. As infection rates increase, the world experienced a global lockdown (framed by nationalist tendencies). This short segment also considers the imaginative and inspiring ways for people coping with our new reality.

CONTACT TRACING | SURVEILLANCE | DYSTOPIC VISIONS

Contact tracing as a pandemic control solution is not new. Contact tracing describes the process used to identify and monitor individuals in close contact with someone infected. These people are (obviously) at a higher risk of infection and contagion. Infectious disease control measures often attempt public health surveillance. Such actions were deployed for illnesses like measles, SARs, typhoid, meningococcal disease. Public health surveillance has also tried contract tracing as a responsible strategy to curtail sexually transmitted infections like HIV/AIDS. From what I can see, the efforts are futile.

To curb the spread of the disease using traditional contact tracing methods and techniques would require an army of coronavirus trackers. Tracking and surveillance innovations like using location data stored on or generated by smartphone use, scanning public spaces for people potentially affected using fever detecting infrared cameras, facial recognition and newer computer vision surveillance technologies are improving rapidly. Contact tracing to combat COVID-19 has already been implemented and deployed. Sophisticated uses of smartphone technologies and artificial intelligence for tracking and public surveillance raise several privacy and compliance concerns. The extent to which COVID contact tracing violates human and/or equity rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is unclear. Is this a UTOPIAN VISION or a DYSTOPIC nightmare? If you were to map your mobility in the last few months, would you be added to the list of Public Health risk factors?

QUESTIONS

Are you aware of your GPS coordinates? Do you know how to find the proper and exact location? Have you downloaded a Contract Tracing application?

Do you have faith that technology is the solution to this global health challenge? Why?

Do you have concerns about your health-related data?

What about other personal data, like age, sleep schedule or grades?

What is your position on Contract Tracing?

PANDEMIC PANICS

One of the first things we can do as media scholars is to look at history. What can we learn from previous pandemics? Have any of you explored how pandemics in the past have shaped our world? And what invisible technologies make what things possible?

the SPANISH FLU

It is 1918 and the end of WWI. Millions are dead, and the world is exhausted by war. A new horror soon sweeps the world, a terrifying virus that will kill more than fifty million people. This virus is called the Spanish flu. Dramatic reconstruction brings to life the onslaught of the disease and the horrors of those who lived through it. The efforts of pioneering scientists desperately looking for the cure considers whether, a century later, the lessons learnt in 1918 might help us fight a future global flu pandemic.

LIFE TO DESTROY LIFE

An antibiotic is a chemical substance produced by one organism that is destructive to another: life could be used to destroy life. Antibiotics are natural substances released by bacteria and fungi into their environment to inhibit other organisms. This is chemical warfare on a microscopic scale.

ABOUT ANTIBIOTICS

1921. The discovery of penicillin was an accident. About seven years prior, Alexander Fleming discovered a bacterial-dissolving substance in a nasal mucus culture, which he called LYSOZYME. He still could not purify this substance for clinical use, nor was it effective against disease-causing-bacteria.

1928. Fleming noticed that staphylococcus bacilli would not grow on a culture medium that was accidentally contaminated with the mold, PENICILLIUM NOTATUN. The bacteria grew around the mold, and colonies around the mold were watery and transparent. The evidence was clear to Fleming: the mold produced something poisonous to bacteria. He named his accidental discovery PENICILLIN. In further tests, Fleming learned that his discovery presented the growth of a range of bacteria without harming healthy tissue or interfering with the defensive role of white blood cells.

1938. Clinical trials were delayed until the unstable substance could be produced in concentrated amounts sufficient for testing. The real work to turn PENICILLIN into an effective antibiotic was created by Howard Florey and Ernst Chain (who would share the 1945 Nobel Peace Prize with Alexander Fleming).

1940. Florey and Chain published results from their first experiments on mice, presenting penicillin as nontoxic and effective against various pathogens, including the bacteria that cause gangrene.

1941. As the Second World War continued through winter, countries also entered a race to mass-produce PENICILLIN. A large quantity of PENICILLIN was needed to treat soldiers wounded in the war. PENICILLIN did not treat soldiers’ wounds, rather the poisoned blood carrying infection. PENICILLIN demonstrated an astonishing ability to prevent and treat infections during field trials on wounded soldiers.

1942. Howard Florey and Ernst Chain invent a manufacturing process for PENICILLIN, which can now be sold as a drug.

1944. As allied soldiers arrived in Normandy, they carried large quantities of PENICILLIN.

1945. Mass production methods made the drug available for general public use. Mass production also led to a significant decrease in the cost of PENICILLIN. Prices fell from twenty dollars per dose in 1943 to fifty-five cents per dose by 1946.

1947. PENICILLIN-resistant microbes appear.

ANTIBIOTICS AS WONDER DRUG

50 years since the development of PENICILLIN, bacteria emerged that is resistant to every known antibiotic. Is the era of antibiotic wonder drugs coming to an end? Let’s search for an answer to that question—an answer that will affect hundreds of millions worldwide.

QUESTIONS

The length of time, from accidental discovery to the capitalist, material abundance is longer than most expect. How much time are you able to track?

What were the major obstacles?

What ethical decisions were required?

Would you make the same decisions?

Do you answer based on some moral model? or ethical framework? or hero’s actions?

How do you understand the threat of antibiotic resistance?

Can this challenge be solved?

What UTOPIA VISION best fits a future without antibiotics?