Managing Fear Through Digital Interactions: Emerging Narratives of the COVID-19 Pandemic in a Vaccine-Hesitant Cyber Community

Abstract

In this article, I analyze the meaning-making struggle within a major Polish vaccine-hesitant cyber community triggered by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on an online observation of interactions directly following the outbreak in Poland, and in-depth content and conversational analysis of selected conversations, I posit that the pandemic circumstances were experienced in this community as a pervasively ambiguous situation: ambivalent in cognitive, emotional, and epistemic dimensions. The article identifies collective social processes embedded in digital interactions through which this initial ambiguity was ordered, and narratives of the pandemic emerged, enabling the collective management of fear of the novel infection.