A Semiotic Perspective on Post-Truth Regime: Angst and Anxiety During the Time of COVID-19

From a semiotic perspective, each statement expresses a point of view, a voice, an implicit set of values. In short, any statement is never a pure description of a state of affairs but always the expression of models of values or knowledge that shape our way of seeing the world and interacting with others. Therefore, every statement and utterance reflects actions, narrations, visions, and passions. If there is no clear separation between facts and emotions, between objectivity and a subjective framing of the world, then the semiotic approach would seem to “neutralize” some current positions in the media discourse. For example, if it is generally acknowledged that informational discourse is almost “polluted” by the emotional component, from a semiotic point of view, it is impossible to have informative discourses without pathemic elements. However, these theoretical positions are not as radically opposed as they seem. Even from a semiotic point of view, in fact, current information has a specificity at the pathemic level. And a specific role of emotions indeed characterizes the post-truth regime of our contemporary times. In general, we can state that post-truth is an informational-discursive regime in which emotions play a predominant and specific role. The definition proposed by Oxford Dictionaries in 2016 when the word post-truth was selected as the word of the year is well known: “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”. Moreover, during the COVID-19 pandemic, we witnessed the rise of another significant word, “infodemic”, namely an informative-discursive modality that generates a viral overproduction of discourses under the pressure of fear (therefore of a specific emotional element), losing accuracy.