Public service advertisements created by chinese citizens on social media as health communication and entertainment education strategies to respond to Covid-19 in China

Abstract

The impact of COVID-19 pandemic and the infodemic coming hand in hand caused by excessive information and omnipresent mis/disinformation is immense in multiple dimensions of the economy, politics, society, and culture. In the process of fighting the pandemic, a considerable number of public service advertisements (PSAs) have emerged and left a deep impression on the general public. In the context of China, PSAs contributed by citizens on social media, in particular, have played an essential role in conveying ideas, promoting virtues, popularizing knowledge of COVID-19 prevention, and spreading positive energy through artistic creation, which shows a heart-reaching power of encouraging and motivating the general public to follow the prevention measures.

Therefore, considering the complexity of the social panic over the unknown virus and the lack of effective prevention and control solutions apart from the lockdown in the first wave in China, this work studies the effectiveness of adopting PSAs created by Chinese citizens on social media as Health Communication and Entertainment Education strategies to respond COVID-19 on Chinese social media during that period.

Among the multiple possible approaches of Health Communication and Entertainment Education, this work is conducted within the framework of Communication for Social Change (CCS) and Culture Centered Approach (CCA) due to the little attention they have received in all the published research, as well as the importance of citizen participation to promote social changes in the health sector and in crisis response.

From the methodological perspective, a descriptive, analytical, and qualitative case study is carried out, with consideration of digital ethnographic elements. A series of PSAs in the form of cartoon posts created by a popular cartoon illustrator has been selected, as they had the most impact and repercussion on Chinese social media Sina Weibo during the lockdown of Wuhan from the 23rd of January to the 8th of April in 2020. The graphic design, discourses, and narratives in the selected cases for encouraging and motivating the Chinese population will be analyzed. The analysis of participatory possibilities offered by social media for the construction and dissemination of citizen initiatives will also be considered.

In the preliminary conclusions, possibilities and potential of the strategies conceived from the participatory approaches of Health Communication and CCS are evidenced in the analyzed PSA cases. Furthermore, the ambivalence of the entertainment strategies has been pointed out as it runs the risk of privileging digital capitalism rather than social transformation, as well as neglecting structural issues like the digital divide.