Will the recessionary economy catch the flu?
 

The immediate concerns of the Swine Flu (or the H1N1 virus, as hog producers would have us call it) is its direct effects on such things has pork exports and air travel. However, as limited as this sounds, it has far-reaching consequences, does it not?

There's a good chance this virus is going to reach a pandemic level, which essentially means it's infectious and widespread. This will hit travel hard, and not just in Mexico. A lot of our economy is generated with the help of business travel and tourism, and both of these could be hindered. Throw in a heavy hit on global pork producers and you have yourself an added strain on an already recessionary world economy.

Tourism itself affects so many other industries, including retail, transportation, hospitality, and entertainment, just to name a few.

• How much worse do you think this flu virus will make the economy?
• What should be done to help alleviate this?
• Is enough already being done?
• Is the media doing more harm than good in handling information and communications regarding this?
• How might this virus affect the industry in which you work?

the associations bundled around viral metaphors are obviously dense and this enables a rapid migration from register to register. these migrations seem to happen almost unconsciously, a function of repetitions or mappings in the imagination of the people who write scripts. the press, given to telegraphic forms of communication as a function of the media they work in, seems to be inclined to traffic in these associations because they enable the telegraphic forms to acquire density, using rhetoric that makes otherwise flat descriptions jump out at you, affect you. this is important for maintaining engagement, which in turn is fundamental to the selling of advertising. in the commercial shangri-la that is the united states, infotainment is an advertising delivery system, so anything that captures attention--and particularly anything that generates a kind of floating anxiety that is itself mediated by the accounts of events in the world---are good for business. it is better of course if these events follow the usual narrative arc of problem-->strategy-->implementation-->conquest because the last 3 phases enable the this mediation function to acquire a therapeutic dimension.

so you find in a situation of generalized anxiety about the implosion of neoliberalism and the socio-economic relations it enframed a particularly fertile space for media self-promotion, and by extension promotion of the advertising for which it stands across the riot of curious metaphors associated with swine flu.

this says nothing about the relations which may obtain between this infotainment and situations in the world. it's just about how the rhetoric seems to operate.

i gotta go.

It's a very good time to be in the vitamin C business. Or the Airborne business.