Audible voices of others and the role reversals in media systems: the pandemic lessons

Abstract

Virality being the routine of the day in the contemporary media sphere, COVID-19 stands as the first global pandemic in a net¬worked information age guided by artificial intelligence, machine learning, and algorithms. Almost every global pandemic in the history, to be specific, which affected the first-world, had hap¬pened before the disproportionate expansion of the information age; enwrapped in and guided by digital-social networking. Now, the pandemic challenges put forth questions on the hegemonic information dissemination notions, media ownership/monopoly, reach/access of ICT and balance of power enjoyed and rested within the western media systems. The diversity,(culture, language, geography, religion) digital divide, power segregation, difference in the system, control and governance of media, channels and means of information were openly recognized and accepted as a reality of imbalances throughout, when the whole world switched to a mode of crisis communication. These questions encompass big challenges to western media in their dominance that too in their economic, cultural, and social realms exerted over the later half of the zoth century until now. Here, we exhibit and argue that the control and the power of dominant western media have been diminishing in the socio-economic and cultural context created by the pandemic.