Festivals of fear, fun and fecundity: Feelers from media feeds and consumption on COVID-19

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Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused massive disruptions in the normal life of the people, especially with several mitigating protocols rolled out to help curb its effects. While some of these measures are hard on the people especially with the peculiarity of the African continent, it has no doubt open up the media space for other issues of engagements. These issues include fear, fun and fecundity in human and survival ecology. Media portrayal had produced fear of the known and unknown, it has created comic relief especially on the social media as well as open the quarantined-mind to more fertile ventures during the period marked by various levels of lockdown, social and physical distancing, isolation and quarantine. This paper aim at telling compelling stories from media feeds and individual experiences by evaluating effects from consumption on COVID-19 contents by cross sections of Nigerians which include those infected, isolated and those who are not. It is a qualitative content analysis that leverage on Katz, Blumler, and Gurevitch’s uses and gratifications, Mead’s symbolic interactionism and Schutz’s social construction of reality theories to help locate the narratives that people use media in certain existentialist situation to create symbols and construct realities around such phenomenon. Thus, while so many may beguile the effect created by the pandemic, others may carve out positive from them and foster newer bonds. Analysis would be done using thematic and explanation building patterns. It is important to document such narratives as it will no doubt help understand media use and attendant gratifications as well as the ecology of media effects and processes.