How the COVID-19 Dashboard Went Viral: Affective Flows and the Mediation of Emergency

COVID-19 dashboards, web applications that published epidemiological data, became ubiquitous during the pandemic, thereby establishing dashboards as key mass media for managing emergencies. This article investigates their proliferation in the German response to COVID-19, drawing on interviews with dashboard creators and experts in epidemiological surveillance and using situational analysis. In addition to structural factors like open data and social media, dashboard creators explained their creations as resulting from dynamics of contagion and imitation: they followed others’ examples or felt compelled by the proliferation of dashboards to adopt the format. Taking these interpretations by the actors themselves seriously, this article critically interprets the proliferation of COVID-19 dashboards through the lens of relational transmissions of affect, using Gabriel Tarde's sociology as a theoretical framework. Mapping these affective flows uncovers a recursive loop in which the felt intensity of the emergency both shaped and was shaped by mediation. Rather than simply reflecting infection rates, the rise and decline of dashboards was understood by participants as deeply intertwined with and co-constitutive of the emergency's affective intensity. This analysis advances our understanding of the epistemological complexities of governing emergencies, highlighting the dynamic interplay between affectively charged situations and the media that make sense of them.