Professor of Film Studies, Bangor University

Assistant Researcher, School of Arts, Culture and Languages, Bangor University

Research Assistant in Media Communication and Critical Discourse Analysis, Bangor University

Professor of Linguistics, Bangor University

Nathan Abrams, Thora Tenbrink, Anaïs Augé and Maciej Nowakowski received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Bangor University provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.

In Western countries, people are polarized by wearing masks. Although some people support wearing them to effectively fight the virus, others believe that having to wear a mask violates their human rights.

Our interdisciplinary team is currently exploring the role of the media in influencing the British public’s thinking and decisions about wearing masks. We found that the media reflected and reinforced these polarized views, and there were obvious differences.

Information to support wearing masks appears more in mainstream media, including public health advertisements and television. On the contrary, the emotion of not wearing a mask is more common in personalized resources such as social media.

Here, wearing a mask is usually related to the historical orders of authoritarian governments. Some people even compared the rule of wearing a mask with the Nazi policy of forcing Jews to wear yellow stars.

This difference in attitude is a relatively new development. When asked to wear masks in response to health epidemics and other dangers in the early 20th century, people were more cooperative.

In fact, a study in 2021 outlined how the approval ratings for face masks were generally more positive during the early crisis. During the flu of 1918, the British Blitz in 1941, and the smog that broke out in the UK from the 1930s to the 1960s, masks were not as controversial as they are today. What explains this change?

Coronavirus is invisible to the naked eye, and its most serious effects will not be seen publicly-they occur at home or in hospital wards, far away from people's sight.

On the other hand, smoke can be seen. Similarly, the threat of Nazi attacks in the 1940s was manifested in the smoke, debris and dust in the air after the German bombing, as well as physical damage and rubble. Even the 1918 flu, although its symptoms are very similar to those of COVID, it can be said to have more public visual features (such as vomiting and diarrhea), making it resistant to public suspicion.

It may be that the actual visibility of these early crises makes them seem more threatening, so wearing masks seems more necessary. In fact, in order to make the danger posed by COVID more obvious, politicians and the media used war language when discussing COVID, or used images of people on ventilators to realize the threat.

However, this strategy has caused major controversy between health professionals and linguists, because these strategies have had suspicious effects, such as the possibility of identifying an infected person as an "enemy" that carries and spreads the virus.

The second factor is that the media used to be limited to channels controlled or influenced by the government, which all portrayed the mask positively. However, today there are many other channels to resist.

In the early crisis, the media promoted wearing masks as a patriotic act. However, the scope of the media in the first half of the 20th century was far more limited than it is today. In the 1910s, the promotion of wearing masks was mainly limited to government-approved posters and newsprint.

It was not until ten years later that mainstream broadcasting appeared. Television was only introduced in the 1930s, but it did not become popular until much later. In the era of wearing masks in the past, radio, printed matter and newsreel were the main sources of public information.

In contrast, today’s media landscape—especially social media—allows personal and personalized voices to be heard to an extent that was unimaginable in previous decades. The media has become a way to discredit and support wearing masks.

Even music videos provide an opportunity for people to oppose the mask, in stark contrast to the propaganda films of the 1940s. For example, in the "Living the Dream" video of the American rock band Five Finger Death Punch, wearing a mask is described as a way of forcing people to obey in the reimagining of the dictatorship of the United States. However, in the end, the public rebelled and were shown to tore off their masks as they battled hypocritical unmasked leaders.

Although public information from the NHS and the British government specifically advocates the use of any "face mask" (including headscarves, scarves, old clothes, etc.), such information is almost always accompanied by images of surgical masks. The graphic representing the need to wear a mask almost always depicts a surgical mask.

When looking at the British newspaper's database of reports on the COVID pandemic, it became clear that reporters referred more to "masks" rather than "face masks." Although official guidance only requires the use of appropriate masks in medical settings, the way people talk about and describe them shows that other forms of masks are not widely accepted.

Although there are good reasons for this—surgical masks have proven to be more effective than other forms of face masks—but in the public's mind, this may limit the scope of correct wear. This may reduce people's willingness to wear masks, because it is well known that if people think they have a choice, they are more likely to accept to do something.

In the past, the same pressure did not exist. During flu and smog outbreaks, people have become more tolerant of alternative face masks, and even in the fashion culture of London and Manchester affected by the smog epidemic, non-standard masks have also become popular. At that time, surgical masks were not so widely used. Compared with today, this room for provision may also lead to less controversy over the requirements for masks.

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