TORONTO -- One year after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic, countless hours of media coverage, briefings, panels, modelling and breaking news alerts have kept Canadians abreast of how the world is grappling with the virus.
Hopes for lockdowns to be lifted and for lives to return to some semblance of normalcy are pinned on the global rollout of vaccines, and much has been said about the “timetable” or “road map” of vaccine development, manufacturing and delivery to Canada.
But Ruth Derksen, professor emeritus in the philosophy of language and civil engineering at the University of British Columbia, says that presenting vaccine rollout as a linear “point A to point B” process, rather than framing it as a “journey,” may be fuelling Canadians continued frustrations with vaccine rollout delays.
“There's two kinds of two ways to frame language, episodic framing, which is a single story, a single linear railroad…it narrows, it isolates, it's sometimes more sensational,” Derksen said in a telephone interview with CTVNews.ca Thursday. “But the preferred way of framing language is thematic framing of the vaccine as a system, as an odyssey together, a journey together.”
In other words, the key message officials should be giving is that we're in this for the long haul, Derksen explains.
“This is long term. This is a system,” she explained. “We are travelling, and as in any trip or odyssey, there are some detours, there are some hairpin curves, there are some straight roads, yes, but…I think would be so much more helpful for people to accept that it's not a straight line, it's not linear, it's a circle of a journey.”
Associate Professor Jessica Mudry, who teaches at Ryerson University’s school of professional communication, with a focus on health communication, says that understanding Canadian’s frustrations with aspects of the national COVID-19 response, including the vaccine rollout, should be viewed in a global context.
“Ideologically we sit somewhere between Europe and America, we enjoy a great deal of personal freedom here and unfortunately, in the face of an airborne virus, we had to grapple with curbing those personal freedoms,” Mudry said in a telephone interview with CTVNews.ca Friday.
Mudry said that by and large Canadians trust the government to take care of their public health, which is something “not enjoyed by everybody in the world.”
Mudry said that understanding whether or not pandemic messaging is “working” will always lie within the “contours of whatever political ideology exists within a country.”
“So in the Canadian context, we have a national health care system that for the most part, works pretty damn well. So I think that's what Canadians are suffering from right now is a little bit of frustration that perhaps we could have avoided by better messaging,” she said.
And the problem doesn’t lie with the virus or with vaccines, Mudry says.
“The problem at its core is human behaviour not getting in line with the science… the messaging is actually about human behaviour,” she said. “How do we get people to act like they should act to prevent the spread of the virus? It’s spread from human to human we're social beings.”
“Instead of just telling me to wash my hands or wear a mask, recognizing that there are going to be moments where I just don't want to do it and figuring out when those moments may occur or why those moments may occur, doing some audience analysis would have saved us a lot of time and energy and frustration,” she said.
IS HOW WE TALK ABOUT THE VIRUS HELPFUL?
Examination of how different leaders and health officials at both the federal and provincial level have framed the ongoing efforts to curb the spread of COVID-19 show a lot reliance on “clichés” Derksen says.
“The dominant language metaphor has been the war metaphor, COVID is an enemy to be beat, to be conquered,” Derksen said. “The ultimate goal is to unite people in this. In finding a cure and finding a way forward with COVID - language unites us with collective cultural reference points that speak to the social glue.”
Derksen says pandemic messaging focuses too much on "easy, clichéd, predictable language," noting "there are some marvellous and far more effective metaphors to use if we want to shape people's thinking."
Mudry agrees.
“It's a bad lesson to use the ‘battle against COVID-19’you're battling against something that you can't see, you can't hold in your hands,” she explained. “It just it sets up this ‘us versus them thing’ that gets played out in weird places…it's carried by people, so then you're actually by default, making people the enemy.”
Taking her criticism of pandemic messaging further, Mudry says there hasn't been a unifying message at federal or provincial levels.
“Nothing that has come out has been memorable,” Mudry said.
“The closest we've come in Ontario is [Premier] Doug Ford telling us that we need to band together. It is pure cheerleading at its best, but incredibly uninspiring at its worst. I don't need your cherry cheesecake recipe. I need somebody who is going to make assertive, scientifically sound arguments, who clearly knows the voting population. It just smacks of a real ignorance for who Ontario is.”
Mudry said there may not be just one metaphor that works for pandemic messaging, but that politicians and health officials should have a series of metaphors or stories or narratives that they can tailor to different audiences, but that that research “was never done.”
Derksen offered the example of “ecological metaphors” that may inspire more social cohesion.
“Events such as tsunamis and tornadoes are events outside of our control, it is something that is universal - a way of bringing people together rather than dividing. Looking through that lens, I can see some more positive social action and social glue because it's a common external force,” she said.
Derksen said the critical importance of language cannot be overstated, especially when dealing with a pandemic that has affected every aspect of daily life.
“The limits of our language are the limits of our world.”
