La série télévisée comme métaphore fonctionnelle et mémorielle de la pandémie Covid-19

Abstract

At the beginning of 2020, a pandemic forces the authorities to brutally and drastically limit physical contact, imposing social distancing at every point on the globe. Media and social networks will “soap opera” (Benassi 2017), participating in the creation and planetary dissemination of a narrative whose main protagonist is the SARS-CoV-2 virus, a biological signature whose vicissitudes can be followed, quantified by numerous websites with their daily updated tables and curves. Experienced and observed through screens, the Covid-19 virus is making its way into the media and social media, where comments, testimonials and feelings are shared. As experiential frameworks, networked screens reconfigure activities and provide a framework for exchanges, guaranteeing barrier-free gestures. Instead of the metaphor of waves of contamination unable to convey the complexity of the situations encountered, we prefer the model of television series (Morelli 2021), whose immersive narrative mechanisms are more conducive to building and understanding both singular and collective memories of the history of Covid-19.