Information films as rhetorical responses during the COVID-19 crisis

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Norwegian health authorities provided citizens with advice, information about the disease and recommendations to take the COVID-19 vaccine. One of their tools was information videos shared on their official Facebook pages. Through the lens of the rhetorical situation, this article investigates these videos’ role as part of the Norwegian health authorities’ rhetorical response. During a constantly changing pandemic, governments continuously meet new challenges and must adjust their strategies. The various phases of the pandemic and the different rhetorical situations require different responses. We examine how the Norwegian health authorities use information videos to respond to these varying rhetorical situations during the COVID-19 pandemic and what characterizes their visual rhetoric. We show that during a lasting crisis such as the corona pandemic, different phases recur, allowing us to establish some general rhetorical situations. The responses to the situations are part of an ongoing process of rhetoric on the COVID-19 pandemic. Our analyses find that informative videos often use graphic imagery, are longer and use a direct address from authorities to citizen and thus serve a directive function. Persuasive videos are shorter, have less direct voice-over and tend to serve a more expressive function. Still, despite their variation in content and form, the videos share one type of main rhetorical strategy that we call invitation to appreciate. The main appeal in most of the videos is somewhere in-between deference and participation, or sometimes both at the same time. Instead of direct requests, they camouflage the direct appeal for compliance with the measures through filmic strategies in order not to compel acceptance but to invite appreciation. The videos present the citizens with scenarios and position them as apparently free to decide for themselves. In this way the rhetoric of the information films works as invitations to appreciate and adopt certain attitudes and behaviours.