The spread of the virus - the speed, amount of infected people, consequences - was different in the countries, and due to the cultural dissimilarity and mentality, the process of acquisition and acceptance of such necessary isolation varied between human beings. Why? What is the difference if it is a ubiquitous issue?
Psychologically speaking, people have their own habits and way of life that they follow daily and feel comfortable in. And when they are limited with their resources and personally not in the power of their own lives, it leaves a certain imprint on their emotional state and change in behavior. Moreover, bloggers or influencers as they most often should be present online show these worries and vulnerability, opinion on a particular situation to their audience. But do they do it properly during these times? Does their behavior change the attitude of the followers to the circumstances?
To discuss this topic, let's consider travel bloggers on Instagram during the times of pandemic. One is a Russian travel blogger (Yana Leventseva) with 1.1 m followers who is currently in Dubai, UAE during this quarantine time and refused to be sent home by the offer of the Russian tourism ministry. Before traveling to this country, she was visiting London at the moment when the airports were becoming empty, and while she was taking her flight back to Moscow she recorded an instastory saying that she does not share the opinion on panicking by this meaning that people started to wear protective masks, gloves while refusing (she) to do the same at the public place. Moreover, she explained her opinion that people are in a similar situation with other diseases each year and therefore, she would not cancel her flight to Dubai where she is now. Later, she posted a picture and the caption of audience division into two groups one of which is "panicking people" and others who are "rational" ones and take precautions. "If you suddenly began to worry about your health and those around you, just wash your hands more often. Well, lock yourself in the bunker if you feel so less worried. And I will continue to do what I can do best. Learn, maintain sound mind and work." (March 17, 2020 post). How do we like this end of the message? What do we see here? A person with more than 1m followers on Instagram is not wearing any protection during the times of pandemic mentions other yearly issues of people's health, takes flight (without protection) to another country during the time of closing country borders, continues to work while posting the content of luxury living (Rixos Premium Dubai JBR) and abundance of food. And all this is broadcasted online through instastories to the wide audience. Besides promoting people's negative emotions towards her because of the shown "benefits" (apartments, food, etc), the blogger actually does not take any social responsibility as she does promote her subjective opinion on the ongoing situation refusing to show the need of people to remain home for a while and wear the protection.
In comparison to Yana Leventseva, the other travel bloggers who are famous under the name of Explorerssaurus_ from Portugal (Raquel and Miguel) own 733k followers seemed to take the social responsibility during the pandemic. First of all, in their bio caption, they used the hashtag "stayhome", almost every instastory they show their home routine and if they leave the house to the supermarket they broadcast the process of wearing protective masks and gloves mentioning the reason of this duty, why only one of them is going (to prevent mass gathering), and the content they do became the lifehack of how to "travel" at home. The Internet-famous picture of them to raise awareness of the necessity of the quarantine was on March 22 with the words "stay home" which later turned into flashmob and most people started to send them similar pictures.
So, do we feel the difference? Both mentioned influencers are relatively famous travel bloggers who transmit the same situation differently. The first one does not call on action to take precautious and continues to travel, while the other one takes social responsibility and helps the audience to overcome such life difficulty through their own visual example. The difference is valuable, while one target audience might acquire reckless behavior and do not pay attention to the significance of the pandemic, risk others' lives and health because the favorite influencer does not consider it as a serious issue, the other one will support each other and learn the essence of remaining home. Such transmission of information should be monitored on the level of censored content as it indirectly propagates inappropriate and dangerous behavior to a significant amount of people.
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