Abstract
In this article, I analyze the meaning-making struggle within a major Polish vaccine-hesitant cyber community triggered by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on an online observation of interactions directly following the outbreak in Poland, and in-depth content and conversational analysis of selected conversations, I posit that the pandemic circumstances were experienced in this community as a pervasively ambiguous situation: ambivalent in cognitive, emotional, and epistemic dimensions. The article identifies collective social processes embedded in digital interactions through which this initial ambiguity was ordered, and narratives of the pandemic emerged, enabling the collective management of fear of the novel infection.
Keywords
Introduction
Vaccine hesitancy has been recognized as a challenge for public health management in modern medicalized societies since the dawn of wide-ranging state-organized vaccination campaigns (Blume, 2006). In multidisciplinary scientific literature, this phenomenon is predominantly conceptualized within an individualistic framing: as an attribute of individuals who are, for various reasons, unwilling to comply with national or international regulations regarding vaccination (e.g., Díaz-Crescitelli et al., 2020; Thomson et al., 2016). If social aspects of vaccine hesitancy are considered, the focus is placed on discourse and content of public debates which may influence individual attitudes: rhetorical strategies, lines of argumentation, themes present in anti-vaccination communication (e.g., Blume, 2006; Kata, 2012; Smith & Graham, 2017), or vaccine-related misinformation spreading through social media networks (e.g., Hoffman et al., 2019). Such approaches, although they allow to grasp the social structure of anti-vaccination movements and semantic composition of their claims, fall short of accounting for how vaccine-hesitant attitudes, and meanings which fuel them, emerge and how they are consolidated in the frames of ever more resonant narratives.
I posit that to address this gap, we must refrain from both biases: focusing on anti-vaccination meanings, discourses, and narratives as independent from the social context in which they are constructed, and perceiving vaccine-hesitant individuals as isolated entities whose orientations are shaped by ready-to-use meanings provided to them by influential actors. Instead, we should see those individuals as active members of actual communities in which meanings are forged and negotiated in collective interactions. Drawing from social constructionists’ premises, such an approach recognizes that meaning-making is a thoroughly social, collective process which cannot be accomplished single-handedly because it requires engaging with others (Barnes, 1992); and that making sense of reality demands cognitive, affective, and epistemic effort by all the actors involved in those interactions.
In the particular case of vaccine-hesitant communities, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic made this collective sense-making struggle even more palpable. As a grounding principle, these communities resist fear of infectious diseases and reject recommendations of actors established in the field of medicine and science (Blume, 2006; Sobo, 2016). Therefore, they constitute an alternative to the dominant circuit of cognition, feeling, and practice regarding health and well-being (Attwell et al., 2018). The pandemic presented a radical sense-making challenge which those communities needed to respond to in order to thrive: an internal, fearless, and somehow negligent stance toward contagious diseases clashed with the external framing which fostered fear of a novel, unknown, and potentially deadly infection. Clashes between contradictory framings, or an absence of any framing which can be used to make sense of a situation, is defined in the socio-psychological literature as the state of “pervasive ambiguity:” a multidimensional ambivalence, which may affect both individuals and collectives, resulting in the inability to adapt to novel circumstances (Ball-Rokeach, 1973).
In this article, I focus on a Polish vaccine-hesitant cyber community and its activity during a month directly following the outbreak of the pandemic in Poland in early March 2020. I analyze the content and dynamics of communication between this community’s members to identify social processes and mechanisms embedded in collective digital interactions through which pervasive ambiguity triggered by the pandemic was collectively managed, and narrative(s) of the pandemic constructed. How did this particular community overcome the cognitive-affective ambivalence of the first days of the pandemic and adapt to the novel circumstances? How did it manage to contain fear of the novel infection, and anxiety triggered by the extraordinary character of the pandemic situation? Which narratives of the pandemic emerged from interactions among community members, and how did they regulate feelings and cognition in the novel pandemic circumstances?
I approach these questions through a digital ethnographic lens (Hine, 2015; Pink et al., 2016), which conceptualizes digital technologies as grounds on which evolving and dynamic constellations of “virtual worlds” (Taylor et al., 2013) emerge in the frames of the culture of connectivity (van Dijck, 2013). Connectivity, that is, technically mediated capacity to connect with others, enables individuals interconnected through digital media to enter into communication with semi-strangers (Foster, 2016; van Dijck, 2013) to share, evaluate, and negotiate their experiences, and collectively make sense of them (Barnes, 1992). Thus, connectivity underpins the constitution of lived experiences and localized lifeworlds, including those related to health and illness, in the digital environments (Foster, 2016). Digital ethnography, focusing on technologically mediated communities (for instance those assembled through various online discussion groups), enables contextualized and holistic research in digital environments through which both key idiosyncratic features of digital subcultures can be uncovered, alongside social, community-based processes through which those subcultures are shaped.
In the analysis which follows, I will, first, disentangle the dimensions of multilayer ambivalence triggered by the pandemic in the chosen community, explain what made it “pervasive,” and how it was experienced by the community members. In the next step, I will trace and identify social processes through which it was collectively managed as narratives of the pandemic emerged within this community. I will demonstrate that those narratives, although to some extent divergent, were predominantly oriented toward the management of fear of the novel infection. The relevance of community-based emotion management for the social process of meaning-making will be discussed in the concluding section of the article.
Methodology and Data Sources
The analysis presented in this article focuses on a selected cyber community. This focus derives from a certain conceptualization of the “ecosystem of social media” (van Dijck, 2013) as a system of interconnected “virtual worlds” (Taylor et al., 2013), that is, social, inhabited, spaces in which shared realities emerge through interactions between members. Those communities, and their lifeworlds, are by no means fixed or stable. On the contrary, they should be seen as constantly adapting to external circumstances, and evolving through internal struggles and tensions resulting from heterogeneity of members, and inevitably diverse experiences, opinions, and orientations with which individuals enter into those communities (Phillips, 2019). The process of alignment in the frames of a shared lifeworld requires engagement with others. Norms pertaining to participation in a given community (Smithson et al., 2011), shared knowledge (McKenzie, 2003), and localized understandings of credibility and legitimacy, emerge through mutual evaluation and assessment of experiences, opinions, and truth claims (Brady et al., 2016). Therefore, I will focus on interactions between community members in which they negotiate, validate, and contest opinions and perceptions of pandemic circumstances, perceiving them as the actual “construction site” of narratives of the pandemic. In agreement with the ethnomethodological premise to focus on observable aspects of human activity (Garfinkel, 1967/1999), I conceptualize interactions as strings of actions (“ethno-methods”) and reactions to the performance of those methods, through which meanings are negotiated and attributed to the initially ambivalent novel reality.
The community which is the object of this study assembled through a public Facebook profile of a major Polish vaccine-hesitant association: “National Association of Knowledge on Vaccines STOP NOP [‘stop vaccination injury’].” This particular community and the location (Facebook) was selected as a site for this research for a number of reasons. First, Facebook is the key social media platform used to search for health-related content or to engage in conversations pertaining to health, including information on vaccines (Smith & Graham, 2017), and yet, due to limited data availability when compared with platforms such as Twitter, it is still under-researched. Second, Facebook’s design, that is, division into profiles and groups, assembles users in “niches” according to their interests, therefore affording the constitution of communities grouping individuals who do not need to be direct acquaintances (Polonski & Hogan, 2015), but become connected through digital communication. The public character of STOP NOP’s profile is, third, additionally beneficial for the aims of this study. The absence of thorough filtering of interaction participants contributes to initial diversity of experiences, and enables in-depth analysis of how this diversity is managed within the community.
The data utilized in this study were collected during the month directly following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in Poland: observation and structured data archivization started on March 11, 2020, and continued until April 11, 2020. Although a month would be regarded as quite short for regular ethnography (Taylor et al., 2013), in this case, due to the specificity of both the pandemic situation (unprecedented for contemporary societies) and of the community (focused on health issues related to contagious diseases), communication within it was extremely lively, and profusion of data was collected, summing up to 87 observed group interactions. During the observation period, I visited the forum daily to collect data in two forms. First, to make “field notes” to collect observations under themes pertaining to the intensity of communication, its emotional tone, diversity of opinions and framings of experiences, and characteristics of most active participants and their orientations. Second, to manually scrap and archive selected threads based on user activity: a minimum of 50 comments and replies in the interaction in 24 hours following the publication of a post; and relevance for the aim of the study: I focused on those conversations in which interaction partners searched for explanations, and shared opinions, on what is actually happening. In this way, I assembled a subset of 30 archived interactions (30 anchoring posts and 4,226 comments and replies to comments).
This subset was further analyzed using the Qualitative Thematic Content Analysis (TCA) approach (Braun & Clarke, 2006) and Conversational Analysis (CA)-inspired approach (Meredith, 2019). The analysis encompassed two stages: in the first stage, based on TCA, a sample of data was coded for emerging meanings. Those initial codes were transformed into a coding framework. The framework was applied to a data sample by two coders working independently, enhanced on the basis of a discussion of discrepancies in the interpretation of the data, and verified on a new data sample. Subsequently, the whole subset was coded. Codes included in the final framework addressed the following aspects of meaning: legitimization and contestation of truth claims and sources of knowledge; emotions voiced, supported, and silenced; aspects of reality discussed; values advocated; level of conviction or doubt conveyed in conversations; key themes considered. In the second stage based on CA-related tools, extracts of interactions encompassing selected themes were analyzed in terms of their sequence organization to reveal the “how” of communication in this community: practices and procedures (methods) employed in group communication, revealing key social processes through which pervasive ambivalence of the first weeks of the pandemic was ordered within the community.
In the Face of the Unknown: STOP NOP in Search for a Narrative of the Pandemic
When discussing the predicament of individuals or collectives who face pervasive ambiguity, Ball-Rokeach (1973) observes that “they must resolve fundamental questions of meaning, such as what is happening and why” (p. 379). If they fail in this task, they are unable to “engage in meaningful social action” (Ball-Rokeach, 1973, p. 379). Conversations led on the STOP NOP Facebook profile reveal that individuals involved in those interactions experienced the first weeks of the pandemic as a pervasively ambiguous situation. Based on the analysis of questions and doubts voiced in these conversations, pervasive ambiguity can be conceptualized as encompassing three aspects of ambivalence: ontological, emotional, and epistemic.
Ontological ambiguity refers to the lack of clarity regarding the very nature of the novel virus and COVID-19 as an illness: whether or not they exist, and to which wider class of objects they should be classified. A crucial and basic categorization which must have been negotiated by the community members to ontologically ground an emerging narrative of the pandemic pertained to differentiating between what actually constitutes reality, and what should be treated as non-existent (Phillips, 2019). Lack of shared ontological categorizations inosculated with emotional ambiguity, that is, the absence of emotional norms which would be legitimized within the community, and would guide feelings and their expression in the pandemic circumstances. Constructing a narrative thus entailed engaging in an emotional process of shaping and norming feelings toward reality, that is, searching for feeling rules (Hochschild, 2003). Finally, the reality of the pandemic remained obscure as long as there was no consensus regarding epistemic tools and strategies legitimized as means of “knowing” about the world-out-there. An emerging narrative had to be embedded in a set of epistemic assumptions articulated through evaluations of different ways of knowing and forms of knowledge (Huovila & Saikkonen, 2016), that is, in a particular vision of how reality can be investigated and “known.” In what follows, I disentangle those three dimensions of ambiguity to demonstrate how, through meaning-making struggles, community members collaboratively ordered their understanding of the situation.
Ontological Anchoring: (De)constructing the Reality of COVID-19
Doubts regarding the nature of the virus and its very existence mark the key line of internal struggles for meaning in the community under study: the division between those who believe that the virus exists and those who deny its existence. In the first archived conversation, a user voiced the crucial question by asking, “And in general, how did this virus come to being? Like that, naturally? Has such a thing ever happened before?” (Conversation 1, March 11). This fundamental doubt revealed tensions within the community. Two main narratives drawing from different social-cognitive operations emerged from this struggle: According to the first narrative, no special novel virus existed, and the situation did not differ from an ordinary one. According to the second one, the virus existed but other underlying factors rendered it dangerous.
The first narrative was formed via deconstruction of the ontological status of the Sars-CoV-2 virus: It was represented as a “sort of flu” and deprived of a unique, distinct character. For instance, in a conversation regarding the nature of the virus, a user wrote, each year a few thousand people die of flu or even more, and until now it has been ok, no one has been scared, and when the flu got a name there is fear and panic, surely, the flu is not a cold and can finish badly, especially for older people, but that we have known for long, and now they made a pandemic out of it. (Conversation 7, March 18)
This entry constitutes an act of active resistance to the external (official) categorization of the novel virus as an object of a distinct nature, which is recognized when a unique name is given. Through insisting on categorizing it as “a flu,” this user engaged in anchoring, that is, a cognitive operation of linking a novel phenomenon to an already existing cognitive category (Höijer, 2011), in this case, a well-known and frequent infection type. This operation aimed at depriving the novel virus of a threatening value, making it more common; as Moscovici (1984) put it, such cognitive operations “make something unfamiliar, or unfamiliarity itself, familiar” (p. 24). An effort to anchor the coronavirus in a wider and less threatening category of influenza viruses is also visible in another conversation about the nature of the illness: Infections of the upper respiratory tract with complications such as pneumonia caused by influenza viruses, and other viruses of the kind, i.e. coronaviruses, are placed in one statistical category. Each year around 15% of the detected upper respiratory tract viruses are coronaviruses and that’s how it has been going for 40 years, and no one proclaimed an epidemic. Every flu virus may cause severe pneumonia and death. (Conversation 14, March 25)
Death appears to be less likely, and, in due course, less frightening when caused by an “ordinary” flu virus; as Höijer (2011) points out, anchoring has an important emotional value: through it, “a new phenomenon is fastened to well-known emotions” (p. 9). It is thus a cognitive-affective operation, one of those where cognition is inseparably intertwined with feeling (Damasio, 1994), and categorization entails eliciting or containing emotions, in this case, restraining fear and anxiety.
Simultaneously, anchoring the novel virus in the category of influenza viruses has a crucial ontological value—It allows for a deconstruction of the (external to the community) social representation (Moscovici, 1984) of the virus as “the novel deadly coronavirus” as non-existent, and reframing it as “yet another influenza virus,” which is neither novel nor especially deadly. However, being one of meaning-making operations, anchoring cannot be done without engagement with others (Barnes, 1992). Each new categorization must be negotiated and is subjected to social evaluation. The categorization of the novel illness as “yet another flu” met with opposition from some community members, for instance, Last season flu caused 143 deaths in Poland, COVID-19 caused 400 deaths in Italy in one day!!! See the difference??? More than 2500 people died during a couple of weeks in Italy!!! . . . 400 people died in one day! 2500 in a couple of weeks in one country! It’s enough for me to see that it’s foolish to compare it to flu! (Conversation 7, March 18)
Resistance toward the “flu” categorization set in motion further ontological deconstruction of the pandemic. To protect and preserve the emerging categorization of COVID-19 as flu, its advocates attempted to delineate the symbolic boundary between non-existing and existing reality (Lamont & Molnár, 2002; Phillips, 2019) so that it encompassed all the pandemic-related circumstances. The operation of ontological deconstruction of the pandemic was performed through questioning of reality, visible in the continuation of the conversation quoted above: And are you sure that these 400 died after Covid-19?? . . . People who manage this system may record those victims as related to Covid-19, and numbers rise, and who would prove if this is true, who would check it? I have an aunt in a hospital in Italy and she says that everyone is recorded as [a victim of] Covid-19, even though they have been ill with cancer for 20 years. (Conversation 7, March 18)
The same method of questioning is revealed in another conversation in which a community member disagrees with the categorization of COVID-19 as flu, and another asks: “But do you personally know someone who got infected with the coronavirus? Did you talk about this? Did you talk about a hospital stay, treatment, recovery, etc.?” (Conversation 5, March 16). Employed in this way, questioning becomes a key method (Garfinkel, 1967/1999) through which ontological boundaries of reality are demarcated and negotiated. In this case, it aimed at undermining trust in mediated (by media or statistics) knowledge about the world, depriving reality of objective character, so that the boundary between the existent and non-existent can be negotiated anew.
As those questions were rhetorical in character, they disabled further interaction and negotiation of meanings. Resistance toward the categorization of COVID-19 as flu was thus not successfully contained: In an ultimate act of opposition, some discussion participants decided to leave. They addressed their farewell posts to the profile owner, for example, “For some time now I haven’t been able to read this bullshit. (. . .) I stop following you” (Conversation 5, March 16); and, Until now I followed your posts, I followed the stories of people harmed by vaccines . . . But I can’t read this crap anymore, I don’t understand you, what is your case??? (Conversation 5, March 16)
This proves that internal tensions, although they initially reflect a usual heterogeneity of members of online discussion lists already documented in research on cyber communities (Brady et al., 2016; Phillips, 2019), can disrupt a community when they pertain to crucial categorizations and ontological boundaries. Members’ alignment around key ontological categories is necessary to trigger a positive emotional appraisal of belonging (Galegher et al., 1998).
In the community under study, such a process of alignment was initiated through a different kind of anchoring performed simultaneously with the previously described one. This alternative anchoring utilized beliefs and emotions already existing in the community, that is, the hesitant and anxious attitude toward vaccines. In the alternative narrative, the massive death toll of COVID-19 in Italy was connected with previous vaccination campaigns. The link between vaccinations prior to COVID-19 infection and death was constructed and reinforced by all the entries in which users suggested its existence; for instance, in a response to fierce opposition toward COVID-19 as flu categorization, a user claimed, No one here says that there are no deaths, but . . . [the main post] says that so many people are dying because they have been vaccinated against meningitis, meningococci and probably flu which caused a deregulation of the immune system in many people with health problems, and this massacre, that so many people are dying each day. (Conversation 10, March 21)
In this entry, the speaker did not question the reality of COVID-related deaths; on the contrary, she emphasized the scale of the death toll, at the same time attributing it to vaccination campaigns. This position was widely supported, for example, They vaccinated the elderly against the flu, the elderly started to get ill and to infect other people. The virus mutated and these are the effects. (Conversation 11, March 22)
The anchoring of COVID-19 in the category of adverse effects of excessive vaccination was further reinforced when other users joined in, sharing their stories in which an act of vaccination was linked with subsequent infections or poor state of health. Each entry offering a first- or secondhand testimony supportive of previous entries, contributed to anchoring the novel infection in a strong existing belief, namely that vaccines are harmful, and that a wide array of health problems can be explained by a reference to vaccines. The vaccine-hesitant attitude was both employed and reinforced in this process, and alignment between community members occurred when they consolidated this core belief. The process of alignment can be traced in the following conversation, which starts from a dissent to a proposed anchoring, but leads to a consent when the categorization of vaccines as harmful agents is activated:
. . . it is not only the elderly who are dying and getting ill . . . . In a hospital in Wales everyone in the intensive care unit is 50 or younger (. . .).
They probably let themselves be bamboozled with the flu vaccine and they have 36% higher chances of having post-vaccination complications (. . .).
That vaccines make the organism weaker, I already know, so I don’t vaccinate my kids, not at all. I know so many people who suffered very much after the flu vaccine. From what I know the [British] royal family don’t take vaccines, eat healthy stuff etc., but everyone is wondering why Prince Charles recovered [from COVID-19] so quickly . . . (Conversation 24, April 05)
Thus, the key claim of the emerging narrative was confirmed. At this stage, if voices of dissent were articulated, they came from outside of the community from individuals who visited the website to engage in polemics, but did not express vaccine-hesitant attitudes themselves. Thus, contrary to the previously described anchoring of COVID-19 as non-existent, this narrative did not disrupt the community but consolidated it, enabling, through a version of the “confirmation effect” (Del Vicario et al., 2016), a re-articulation of core meanings already existing in the community. Through mutual consensus and collaborative confirmation, those meanings were incorporated into a narrative of the pandemic, depicting it as a result of massive, state controlled and organized vaccination campaigns which did not only fall short of protecting the most vulnerable individuals—in this case: the elderly—but exposed them to additional threats.
Emotional Norming: Ordering Feelings Toward the Pandemic
Ambiguity regarding what to feel in the face of the novel infection was a crucial aspect of the lived experience of the first weeks of the pandemic for the users of the STOP NOP fanpage. Emotion norms or feeling rules (Hochschild, 2003), much like cognitive categorizations and ontological boundaries, became the realm of internal struggles and tensions. Some interaction participants perceived fear as a “natural” bodily response to the situation. For example, one person asserted, “No one knows what is going to happen. So we do have the right to fear the worst” (Conversation 8, March 19). Such claims, however, met with a strong resistance from other discussion participants. For instance, to an entry in which a user claimed the right to be afraid of the virus, another person responded with a meme showing a coffin with a caption: Last minute news: [a city’s name]: There is a first case of death at home caused by the virus! No one talks about this! Janusz G. was crushed by 300 kg of pasta and 150 kg of rice. (Conversation 5, March 16)
This meme performed two functions. First, it used mockery to criticize the fear of the novel infection and irrational behaviors to which it may lead, such as hoarding basic commodities and food. Second, it ridiculed the link between the novel infection and death. Although no direct claim about the virulence of the virus was made in the meme, the humorous character of the message enabled taming the threat, and ridiculing those who admit to being afraid. Meme-based ridiculing is an exemplary case of a method of negative affective sanctioning (Rafanell, 2013), that is, interactional shaming of unwanted feelings and behaviors. In this conversation, the use of this method contributed to the emergence of a key emotion norm, according to which both feeling and displaying fear in pandemic circumstances was regarded wrong.
Shaming via ridiculing enabled constituting a norm, but the norm needed to be fleshed out with meanings. This occurred when other users posted entries supporting the claim against fear, adding further layers of meaning and justifications to this norm. In another interaction, a user explained why in his view it is wrong to be afraid: It’s very sad to read [what] those scared people [are writing]. Of course there is a plague of a damn infection which gets to older persons and people with low immunity. But this is what happens every year. Last year no one would have written on the Internet that their grandma is dying from the flu in hospital. And now you better not sneeze in a crowd because they will lynch you. And here it begins . . . man will be wolf to man. (Conversation 2, March 12)
This quote demonstrates how fear was regulated in interactions between community members: Emotional ordering took place when an emerging emotion norm was embedded in other, already existing norms and values, such as—in this case—the value of sociality and solidarity. According to a claim conveyed in this entry, the fear of infection was not only unjustified, it was also morally wrong because it led to disruption of social ties. Therefore, anyone who demonstrated fear could be condemned for behaving immorally.
Gradually, through users’ entries, an array of beliefs about fear was assembled in the record of interactions between community members. Fear was presented as immoral because, in addition to posing a threat to interpersonal solidarity, it was believed to render people more vulnerable to illnesses and infections, for instance, Panic and fear are an open door to an illness, and they will not help you in anything. . . . Have you yourself seen corpses lying along the roads? Instead of spreading unjustified panic and infecting others who are psychologically weak, maybe it is better to do something useful, such as reading with comprehension or listening to wise doctors, such as [a name given]. (Conversation 18, March 29)
In this entry, fear was represented as a contagious infection. A representation of fear as an infection was also explicitly articulated elsewhere (“Fear is the virus which infects others,” Conversation 10, March 21). Thus, fear and anxiety assumed the place of the actual virus as harmful agents. Accumulation of entries in which beliefs about fear were articulated, negotiated, and finally agreed upon enabled a constitution of a local ethnopsychology (Thoits, 1989) of fear, that is, of a socially shared stock of cultural beliefs about emotions, in this case, fear. The emerging ethnopsychology of fear was further reinforced when community members’ feelings were brought in line with it either through social confirmation of attitudes compliant with emotion norms deriving from it or through negative sanctioning of “deviant” feelings and their displays.
Confirmation of opinions and emotions was performed by emphasizing similarity or convergence of experiences, and resulted in the confirmation of a norm—when others subscribe to an emergent norm, it becomes socially legitimized and established. In a similar vein, collaborative negative sanctioning of feelings diverging from the norm contributed to norm reinforcement. This process is visible in the following conversation in which a group of users made an effort to bring one person’s feelings in line with the norm which prohibited fear and anxiety. The interaction started when a user challenged the norm: No, I think this is bullshit!!! How can you not be afraid!!! How can you not panic!!! Thousands of people are dying and we are supposed to be happy or what???!!! . . . For the time being I’m panicking and I’m scared of this lout [the virus]!!! Simple. No doctor is able to calm me down.
And was responded by various interaction participants: “Please choose knowledge and read the linked articles”; “I suggest you switch off the TV and limit access to the internet)”; “Common sense and calm, that’s what we need now :)”; and “Panic and fear won’t do you any good, they will just weaken the organism through the cortisol they produce. Positive thinking :).” Under such pressure, the user agreed, “You are right. I do wish I had this calm in myself. But I can’t right now” (Conversation 18, March 29). Although the user felt that she was unable to deal with negative emotions which she was experiencing, she finally submitted to the norm which prohibits displays of fear and fosters calm. She also accepted the belief that fear is harmful, key for the emerging ethnopsychology. Crucially, those two examples corroborate that emotion management is a collaborative enterprise (Staske, 1996): emotion norms are both constituted and enforced in group interactions by a collective which ascribes to them and sanctions deviant feeling displays (Thoits, 1990).
Containing fear through norm creation and enforcement did not fully eliminate its expressions from the conversations among community members. Voicing fear was accepted, but only if the emotion pertained to other objects, and not the novel illness. In a discussion about fear, a user noted, We should not blame people that they are stupid and succumb to panic, but we should reflect upon the reasons for which they are panicking . . . It has been always known that it is the easiest to rule a riffraff. Now the WHO has proclaimed the pandemic, and people let themselves be persuaded that this is true. And there is a great excuse to vaccinate FORCEFULLY millions of people with some crap. . . . AND I AM NOT AFRAID OF THE CORONAVIRUS, BUT OF THIS SCENARIO. (Conversation 1, March 11)
In this entry, the user contributed to the management of fear and anxiety by channeling them toward another object: These emotions were reoriented from the novel infection and attached to an anti-COVID vaccine, which was potential at the time. This operation did not only contributed to the containment of the fear of COVID-19, but also, simultaneously, reinforced the categorization key for the community: of vaccines as the main threat and the only legitimate source of fear and anxiety. Fear and its regulation was, thus, utilized to strengthen the narrative linking the pandemic with vaccination campaigns, and the emergence of the local ethnopsychology of fear intertwined with ontological grounding of the narrative of the pandemic in shared cognitive categories.
Epistemic Struggles: (De)establishing Legitimacy of Ways of Knowing About the Pandemic
Resolving “fundamental questions of meaning” (Ball-Rokeach, 1973, p. 379) to patch pervasive ambiguity requires, next to ontological anchoring and emotional norming, engaging in epistemic process of establishing “what counts as legitimate knowledge and ways of knowing” (Huovila & Saikkonen, 2016, no pagination) about the world-out-there. In the first weeks following the outbreak of the pandemic in Poland, the community under study made efforts to decide how to establish whether or not the virus exists. Interactions which reveal collaborative “epistemic work” performed by community members focused on two issues: first, swab-based tests, and, second, the media as a source of information about the pandemic. Tests quickly emerged as a basic tool used to identify infected persons and “measure” the pandemic and, for this reason, they became the key epistemic object in the early pandemic circumstances. STOP NOP community members frequently addressed the issue of tests in their conversations, for instance, But the final judgment will be difficult . . . How to recognize if a person died while having the coronavirus, or because of the coronavirus? Some scientists and doctors claim that we have had this virus for a long time now, but no one did any tests. Also how these tests work is doubtful, doctors from China wrote about this. (Conversation 14, March 25)
This quote demonstrates how the method of questioning was employed to represent the tests as faulty, and, thus, to delegitimize them as a tool of knowledge about the pandemic. It is also a good exemplification of numerous negative opinions about tests voiced by community members. These negative opinions were subsequently subjected to the process of mutual evaluation, central for meaning-making (Barnes, 1992; Brady et al., 2016), and positively validated by interaction participants. The following extract of a conversation starting with yet another negative evaluation of tests provides an example of how the positive validation of such opinions was achieved:
First of all, there is no covid test which would be trustworthy. That is, both people diagnosed with coronavirus aren’t necessarily ill because of it, and those victims [deceased] of coronavirus might be victims of something else.
Exactly, I watched an interview with a well-known German doctor today, and he also said that those tests are not really credible, and they can give a positive result even in the case of a different flu virus. (Conversation 4, March 15)
Through the dynamics of mutual confirmations, credibility of tests as a source of knowledge about reality was deconstructed. Delegitimization of tests was a crucial step in the process of epistemic embedding of the emerging narrative of the pandemic. It paved the way for defining the pandemic circumstances as “obscure” due to the shortage of hard data on what is happening, based on which the official narrative about a “novel deadly virus” could be questioned. Simultaneously, it enabled legitimization of an epistemic strategy alternative to references to external sources of information, that is, “logical” and “independent” thinking.
Logical and independent thinking was framed as the only legitimized epistemic strategy through forming an opposition between “information delivered by the media” and “reasoning.” As it was put in one of the conversations, “[i]n todays’ world, logic, thinking, and seeking truth is closer to facts than properly wrapped information in the media” (Conversation 10, March 21). The imperative of logical and independent thinking provided grounds for two epistemic norms which subsequently emerged in interactions between discussion participants. According to the first one, easily accessible information provided by the mainstream media—the second leading topic of epistemically oriented conversations between community members—is dubious by default and must be distrusted. In a conversation about the media, a user voiced this position, observing the following: I have a feeling that they [the media] are manipulating me, they are trying to harm me. . . . They say one thing, and do another. They censor whatever they wish. Listen to no one apart from “their” experts. Experts are sometimes wrong. Sometimes they are paid by Big Pharma. (Conversation 8, March 19)
Through accumulation of highly critical entries of this kind, the mainstream media were framed as dangerous bad faith agents, and referred to with anger, as actors who bring about panic by distorting reality. This is well exemplified by an entry in which a user referred to footage featured in Polish media in mid-March 2020, which presented coffins transported from Bergamo, to offer another interpretation of those images, along with her opinion about the media: This long row of coffins shown by the media are in fact bodies of migrants from 2013 (360 people died then) in a crash of a ship near Lampedusa. Now they are presented as coffins of pensioners who died of coronavirus in Bergamo in Lombardy. Journalistic hyenas spilled this information cesspit into the whole world. (Conversation 14, March 25)
Such a deeply negative categorization of the media (here as “hyenas”) and the official information (as the “cesspit”) rendered the emerging norm of distrust toward the media more binding: an epistemic strategy of rejecting official information sources was framed not only as a desired epistemic orientation, but also as a moral obligation for community members who should refrain from supporting and sharing news that triggers fear and panic. In this way, the epistemic norm prescribing a highly critical attitude toward the mainstream media was anchored in the emergent, local ethnopsychology of fear: once fear was framed as morally wrong and connected with disruption of solidarity and irrationality, this made the resistance toward the harmful impact of fear-spreading news obligatory for anyone who wished to remain within the community.
According to the second epistemic norm stemming from the imperative of logical and independent thinking, knowing the reality is an individual responsibility. This norm was fully articulated and can be identified in a piece of advice given to a user who complained about feeling disoriented in the present situation: “If you are inquisitive, look [for information] on your own, and in important matters, which we would like to discuss rationally, one must be inquisitive;)” (Conversation 12, March 23). Advocating “inquisitiveness,” that is, a questioning attitude toward all information, and an individual search for data, is a way to build ground on which alternative information sources may be recognized as legitimate: as a general rule, the more unavailable a piece of information was, the more credit it received in the community. The process of legitimizing the authority of an alternative expert is visible in the following conversation about an Italian doctor who criticized Italy’s response to the pandemic:
His recent interviews are worth following, but this is just for smart folks ;) . . .
I have been following him and his wife from the very beginning, what a wonderful couple. Unfortunately there has already been a lawsuit against him . . .
Yes, I have just read that “lo hanno denunciato” [“they have denunciated him”] :((Conversation 16, March 27)
In this conversation, alternative sources of information are presented as comprehensible only for independently thinking individuals: “smart folks” from the quote above. This suggests that the process of establishing the two key epistemic norms: the first one, prescribing distrust toward the media, and the second one, calling for assuming individual responsibility for in-depth information search, should be viewed as part of boundary work collaboratively performed by community members, through which the “significant markers of differentiation” (Attwell et al., 2018) were constructed. In this case, a particular epistemic attitude became the key marker and used in a twofold process of reinforcing positive emotional appraisal of belonging to the community, and emotional distancing from non-members: “It’s a pity that we, those who think logically, are so few. Stupidity, riffraff will swallow anything” (Conversation 7, March 18). As Galegher et al. (1998) point out, a positive emotional appraisal of belonging constitutes grounds on which the actual community emerges. Therefore, those emotionally loaded comparisons between members and non-members contribute to the emergence, or, to be more precise, re-articulation and confirmation, of a shared identity. To paraphrase Sobo’s (2016) analysis of social dynamics of refusal, “opting out” of the mainstream media’s fear-loaded narrative of the pandemic becomes “opting in” to the community bound with a certain epistemic attitude based on doubting in the official information about the pandemic, challenging the tools through which it was generated, and distrusting the information sources which disseminate it. Such an epistemic resistance enables, in turn, the construction of an alternative narrative of the pandemic embedded not in external, institutional, data about infection and mortality rates, but in observed correlations and deduced (through logical thinking) connections and causations between events.
Concluding Discussion
Narrative-oriented research points out that narratives organize events and experiences into meaningful units (Squire et al., 2008), thus providing socially shared cues on how to think, feel, and act in given circumstances. Although still emerging and not yet solidified, the repertoire of meanings pertaining to the pandemic here identified constituted a narrative for the community under study: articulation of those meanings enabled the transformation of an obscure and illegible series of events brought about by the pandemic into a story that was comprehensible for community members and, as such, manageable. This study revealed how this transformation was made possible through three intertwined social processes: ontological grounding through which key cognitive categories were formulated and the reality of the pandemic collectively evaluated; emotion norming which enabled an articulation of norms regulating the feelings toward the pandemic and their enforcement in group interactions; and epistemic operations which resulted in the construction of symbolic boundaries around the community as those who properly understand the current situation, separating it from the external world of individuals who are unable to see through the reality. As a result of those efforts collaboratively undertaken by community members, novel and unprecedented reality was defined, and its definition embedded in the systems of pre-existing beliefs and orientations.
The emerging narrative, linking the pandemic with state-organized vaccination campaigns and depicting it as a de-facto aftermath of vaccination programs, enabled re-articulation and reinforcement of the group’s lifeworld around a shared resistance identity (Castells, 2010). Previous research into vaccine-hesitant movements convincingly argues that in their case resistance (refusal) should be seen first and foremost as an act of affiliation and bond-formation with individuals who reject dominant meanings: “refusers’ assertions . . . negate outsider or outgroup definitions of the situation and, most importantly . . . , they reaffirm in-group framings and, thereby, in-group ties” (Sobo, 2016, p. 343). In this way, “opting out” becomes “opting in:” negating the dominant definition of a situation enables the creation of an alternative, in-group affiliation and identity based on a polemic understanding of reality.
In the early pandemic circumstances, the STOP-NOP community engaged in a threefold refusal shaping the internal understanding of reality: against dominant (cognitive) categorizations, against dominant emotion norms, and against mainstream epistemic strategies. The refusal to categorize the coronavirus as novel and deadly might be seen as an extension, or re-articulation, of the rejection to perceive infectious diseases as dangerous. In the emerging narrative, it was vaccines rather than the illness or the virus that were presented as the harmful agent. Thus, the narrative enabled the community to both maintain and reinforce the basic categorization of vaccines as damaging. In a similar vein, the refusal to experience fear of the novel contagious infection, and to follow mainstream information sources which fostered fear, can be perceived as building upon already shaped dispositions to act and feel, that is, existing emotional habitus (Scheer, 2012). The effects of the re-articulation of meanings underpinning practices stemming from this habitus, however, went beyond the “confirmation effect” described in psychologically oriented literature (e.g., Del Vicario et al., 2016): As this process entailed collective, collaborative sense-making, it solidified both the group’s lifeworld and the core beliefs which organized it. As a result, the outbreak of a pandemic of a contagious disease did not undermine this community’s vaccine-hesitant orientation, but—contrary to expectations based on a superficial understanding of social dynamics operating there—it consolidated and strengthened it.
The reinforcement of vaccine-hesitant meanings which occurred in this community in response to the outbreak of the pandemic was underpinned by a collaborative emotion work—emotion management—collectively performed by the community members, through which fear of the novel infection was contained. Emotion management is conceptualized in sociological literature as an interaction-based process through which individual emotions are brought in line with existing, socially constituted, emotion norms (Hochschild, 2003; Lively & Weed, 2014). In this particular case, however, the community under study could not rely on a ready-to-use set of emotion norms. Those norms needed to be first constructed and legitimized by community members; a general, underlying emotional orientation, or more specifically, a fearless attitude toward known infectious diseases, had to be particularized and attached to the novel infection. This was achieved through a process in which emotion management intertwined with a cognitive reorientation. Although in accordance with existing research on social cognition (see, e.g., Lamont & Molnár, 2002; Moscovici, 1984), the processes of categorization, demarcation of ontological boundaries, and anchoring discussed in the first part of the empirical analysis were described as predominantly cognitive, their emotional dimension and tight coupling with affective mechanisms must now be emphasized: The constitution of particular cognitive categories pertaining to COVID-19 was part and parcel of the emotion work performed by community members, of the deep acting process (Hochschild, 2003) which did not only enabled blocking the expression of unwanted emotions, but also the changing of the feeling itself.
Emotion management based on cognitive reframing was further reinforced by accumulation of a repertoire of cultural beliefs about fear, that is, construction of a localized ethnopsychology of fear. According to Thoits (1989), such cultural beliefs encompass convictions about emotions and emotional ideologies which are shared within a group and constitute a social epistemology of emotions (Gordon, 1989) for the members of this group. Those epistemologies (Thoits specifies, for instance, beliefs regarding potential triggers of an emotion; its duration and intensity; and possible consequences) are crucial, because they enable the emergence of particular emotion norms, in this case, norms pertaining to fear, which prohibited its experience and expression in regard to the novel infection and the virus, but not in regard to vaccines. In this way, rather than being completely banned from the community, the fear was channeled toward vaccines and vaccination campaigns, reinforcing the community’s resistance identity.
Eventually, through the construction of this particular ethnopsychology of fear, the group’s resistance identity was moralized. Vaccine-hesitant communities are akin to other “fringe” cyber communities, such as pro-anorexia (Gavin et al., 2008) or self-injury online groups (Adler & Adler, 2008) in that they provide a space in which otherwise disapproved attitudes can be voiced, and stigmatized identities normalized (Gavin et al., 2008). In this particular case, however, the resistance identity deriving from the vaccine-hesitant orientation was not only normalized, but also moralized: Resistance to the dominant definition of the situation of the pandemic, and the related fear, was rendered a moral obligation for community members. Normalization of an identity through its moralization entails the construction of those who do not subscribe to it as morally inferior, in this case—as those who, through their compliance with recommendations and regulations issued by established health authorities, expose other people to a wide array of perils. This process thus strengthened the positive emotional appraisal of belonging, and solidified the boundary of the community.
A digital ethnographic approach adopted in this study, informed by an ethnomethodological focus on interactional practices and procedures (ethno-methods), revealed how ontological, emotional, and epistemic ordering of the initially ambivalent situation was achieved, and the community’s core beliefs, practices, and identity preserved. In this sense, this study also demonstrates the benefits of digital ethnographic inquiry into the phenomenon of vaccine hesitancy. Existing research on vaccine-hesitant movements and communities connects their proliferation with the postmodern paradigm characterized by delegitimization of science and of established medical authorities, and empowerment of individuals who aim to be “active contributors” to their own health (Kata, 2012). The ethnographic perspective which, instead of utilizing large sets of digital data, focuses on particular vaccine-hesitant communities and contextualized communication between their members, demonstrates how these general orientations emerge, are negotiated and maintained in daily real-life interactions. In the particular case of the STOP NOP community, the key methods underpinning the emergence of a narrative of the pandemic included cognitive-affective anchoring, questioning, ridiculing (an affective sanctioning method), and confirming through emphasizing similarity or convergence of experiences. The differentiation of these methods, ranging from agreeable and conformable to antagonistic and provocative, reveals that a community’s lifeworld does not emerge as a result of simple reproduction, but rather as an effect of a complex and contextual (i.e., localized within a particular community) social dynamic.
Thus, the ethnographic perspective enables us to avoid the fallacy of perceiving orientations compliant with the postmodern paradigm as a product of either univocal consent, or homogeneity of individual vaccine-hesitant attitudes and orientations. Instead, it reveals that sense-making is indeed a collective enterprise, but not necessarily a consensual one: meanings are forged through internal struggles and tensions through which shared realities of groups inhabiting virtual worlds are brought to being. Digital ethnography provides methodological tools through which these tensions can be captured and investigated to unravel the mechanisms underpinning the meaning-making in digital communities.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research presented in this article was supported by the University of Warsaw in the frames of an internal grants initiative.
