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COVID-19 has confirmed some long-understood yet long-ignored truths about the economics of information, and has also highlighted deeply disturbing fractures in today’s information ecology COVID-19 has delivered an extraordinary shock to humanity. Advocates and researchers working on sustainability have rightly seized on the similarly extraordinary opportunity that the (eventual) recovery from this pandemic offers: to […]
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It is exciting and troubling to ponder the profound changes wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic. For example: what will remain of offices when all is said and done? Will there be any? Why make the commute—why rush out the door, juggle childcare, sit in traffic, tolerate boorish coworkers—when the pandemic has shown you can do […]
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When Covid-19 ushered in a new reality and borders began to close in February 2020, I found myself in Prague, the city of Franz Kafka and Václav Havel. Rather suitable companions in such strange and absurd times, I thought. But somehow too obvious. Indeed, for the older citizens of Prague (and of course the Czech […]
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Stories help us understand and explain what we see in the world and they can be a powerful way of passing on knowledge. But misleading or incorrect stories can be confusing at best and harmful at worst. One story that is making the rounds today says that the number of COVID-19 cases is increasing only […]
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In this blog we will discuss the complexities surrounding the use of particular expressions that are somewhat ‘heavy’ from the point of view of language use. In interactional ritual theory, these expressions are referred to as RFIEs. Many RFIEs are intrinsically interrelated with speech acts and their use helps us to indicate that certain ritualistic […]
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Of the various speech acts used in the wake of COVID-19 and the corresponding need for social distancing, ‘Apologise’ is perhaps the most important. Since the enforcement of social distancing unavoidably leads to moral uproar, we often find ourselves apologising profusely for trying to safeguard our own health – an interesting paradox that can be […]
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Until December 2019, I was in Nanjing, some five hundred kilometres from Wuhan where the first cases of the new lung disease were then discovered. When things unfolded in January, I initially felt a sense of having escaped a potentially fatal danger by a hair’s breadth; only to realize a bit later that this wasn’t […]
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What is the nature of human religiosity? For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, psychologists treated this area of human life as a disposition – something Gordon Allport termed a ‘sentiment’.[1] It was conceived as a kind of personality trait along which people varied: some are more religious than others. Personality traits can be […]
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