Folk communication notes on communication challenges in times of the Covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

The leading role of groups and individuals who manifest themselves through popular expressions, in alternative channels of communication can collaborate with the communication challenge imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic, which reveals itself not only in the problem of circulating scientific information of uncertain nature to the general population, as well as confronting the polarization caused by the dissemination of false information, based upon scientific denial. From this premise, we investigate, in essay mode, the theoretical and methodological foundations of a folkcommunication point of view that can contribute to the understanding of these phenomena and also their overcoming, in objective terms. Thus, popular knowledge in confluence with digital social networks, the role of folkcommunicational agents and, particularly, the media activist, as well as a conception of a Scientific Folkcommunication focused on "resistance" and "insistence", marked by the involvement of the receiver in communication processes, establish themselves as references for future empirical research that will evidence communicative practices and strategies of vulnerable and socially marginalized groups in the pandemic context.