Homo digitalis and language practices:

from denial to the “new normal” in pandemic society

Abstract

In this text, I discuss the ongoing denial discursive formation in course in the political-economic scenario of the Covid-19 pandemic. Denialism materialized in concrete discourses, created instances of truth and fields of reality (Foucault, 1987) that act in digital networks, creating subjectivities. To describe the discursive strategy of denialism, I take as a basis the idea of demediatization and spaminization (Han, 2017a; 2018); of echo camera (Mounk, 2019), of homo digitalis and “new normal”, relating them to the society of performance (Han, 2017b). I reflect how demediatization, freedom of expression and lack of transparency, orchestrated in digital echo cameras, form a biopolitics (Foucault, 2008). I also discuss how negationist discourses were enhanced by New Technologies of Information and Communication (NTICs) and subverted the idea of freedom (understood as asocial, self-managed, self-centered, individualized). Finally, I bring the concept of remediatization as a social requirement in the fight against infodemia and its relationship with exotopy (Bakhtin, 2011). This enunciative game of the “new normal” reveals another form of governmentality (Foucault, 1987), which culminates in the precariousness of working conditions, disguised as labor flexibility.