On virtual epidemics and the mediatization of public health

This article uses Wittgenstein’s notion of language games and my approach to communicability in ethnographically exploring cultural models of “communication,” “media,” and “the public” advanced by public health officials and the centrality of mediatization to their institutional practices. I focus on extensive efforts by officials in a California county to disseminate information on West Nile Virus—which has sickened few local residents and killed none—precisely because it highlights substantial gaps between official attempts to regiment the metapragmatics of mediatization and the pragmatic features of news coverage. The conclusion points to analytical problems raised by the complex ways that semiotic mediation and commodification intersect in mediatization.

► Examining the mediatisation of a largely phantom health crisis in the local news media in southern California. ► Using both ethnography and textual analysis of an example to explore biocommunicability.