(How) do we memorialise COVID-19 in the digital age? – Utkarsh Sharma
This paper tries to understand the politics involved in memorialising COVID-19 in the digital world. The COVID-19 pandemic brought forth multiple challenges in front of the world and is expected to continue to do so. How we remember the pandemic is critical to our responses towards challenges that will be posed by it in the medium to long terms. An approach that recognises failures of state policies may yield completely different answers than one that considers COVID a natural disaster. The question is as much of remembering COVID-19 as it is of how it ought to be remembered. While the privately curated National COVID Memorial exists online, it falls short in drawing any relevant connections between the dead and fails to imbue their deaths with any common meaning other than their cause of death. The question of if a memorial is required at all is relevant to this paper, especially in the digital age when images, videos and writings are widely accessible. We can view with hindsight different responses of the Indian masses to the pandemic in each subsequent wave. As videos and images swirled over the digital domain, different kinds of responses to the pandemic were generated. This paper will try to answer if a unitary meaning ought to be given to COVID-19, especially to the backdrop of alternate discourses and experiences available digitally.
