Visual and verbal governance: the case of COVID-19 campaign posters in South Korea

Increasingly, choice architecture interventions aiming to steer people toward desired behaviours have become popular among policymakers. From a multimodal critical discourse analytic perspective, this study scrutinizes the ways in which such interventions are accomplished visually and verbally in official COVID-19 campaign posters, collected between 2020 and 2022 in the lesser-studied context of South Korea. Treating these texts as tools of behavioural governance, the analysis scrutinizes the three constitutive elements of each poster: the representation of the threat, the target audience, and the policy maker. The findings reveal that the virus is depicted as a free-floating, menacing agent, so that the pathogen is empowered, rather than the public. The viewer is individually urged to adopt the recommended practices through intrusive strategies and sometimes blamed for the dynamics of the pandemic. In contrast, the policy maker backgrounds their control by positioning the self as an autonomy-enabling agent for the actualization of the recommended nudges, caring for the in-group members. Overall, the pandemic is approached as an individual responsibility. At the same time, the texts also place emphasis on collective stances. Such distinctive features are attributed to the collectivistic trait of the context. The practical and ethical ramifications of these strategies are also discussed.