The Construction Of Collective Memory Of COVID-19 In Social Media ——A Case Study Of National Mourning Ceremony During The Epidemic

In early 2020,the COVID-19 virus snapped the gears of time and hit the pause button on everything.The sudden outbreak spread across China and the world at an alarming rate,and was regarded as a major public health emergency with greatest difficulty in control and prevention,widest infection and the fastest spread by Xinhua.After three months of hard work to fight the epidemic,the epidemic was effectively controlled.The prevention and control work has achieved a stage victory.A national mourning ceremony was held on April4,2020,to pay tribute to the martyrs and deceased compatriots who died during the outbreak.The national mourning ceremony is a summary of the past epidemic fighting process,which remembers the deceased and history while guiding the strong Chinese people to be grateful and courageous.The media has always served as a witness and transmitter of history,and has also assumed the important role of a writer and bearer of memories.In this public health emergency,people who were isolated at home for prevention had to learn about the world under the epidemic through the media.It can be said that the media played an important role in this "human catastrophe".In the past,research on collective memory has mostly focused on official narratives in mainstream media.However,with the soaring of social media,the collection of opinions and discussion of netizens about important events have also become a part of the construction of collective memory that cannot be ignored.On the other hand,the mechanism of collective memory construction is divided into corporal practices including memorial rituals and collective behaviors,and inscription practices represented by media practices.The construction of memory does not start from the reported text alone,but the corporatization practices of media organizations and netizens themselves as content disseminators should also be included in the discussion of memory construction.By distinguishing two different constructing subjects,official and private,this paper examines the differences and connections between the two discourse fields of collective memory.Using text analysis and content analysis as the entry point,this paper analyzes the texts related to Sina,Weibo and We Chat on the day of the national silent mourning ceremony during the epidemic and the corporatization practices on social media platforms to explore the memory picture presented by the two memory fields and try to clarify the interaction between them.The study reveals the new changes in collective memory construction in social media compared with the collective memory construction in the past,and explores what kind of collective memory against the epidemic and the mechanism of constructing collective memory for the new crown pneumonia was left behind by the national mourning ceremony.The study found that the physical and bodily practices in the national mourning ceremony awakened people's memories of the whole nation's anti-epidemic process;the invisible expressions of the inscribed texts in the mainstream media,represented by People's Daily,revealed the value memory of the mourning ceremony,and the "national" imaginary community was formed and maintained;the inscribed texts of individual memories contained both the reinforcement of the official memory content and the construction of collective memory.The inscribed text of individual memory contains both reinforcement and confrontation and reflection on the content of official memory,becoming an important supplement to the mainstream memory constructed by the official,and fleshing out the collective memory of anti-COVID-19 virus.