Sociology Education

University of Indonesia Education

Online Public Lecture : Covid-19 And Social-Technology Resilience

thumbnail
13-05-2020

On Wednesday (13/05/2020) the Sociology Education Study Program, Faculty of Social Sciences Education (FPIPS) Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia held an Online Public Lecture with the theme "Covid-19 & Tech-social Resilience" as the speaker Assoc. Prof. Sulfikar Amir from Nanyang Technological University Singapore. This activity was held online with 165 participants from various levels of students and lecturers, both from the UPI campus and outside the UPI campus.

Covid-19 is a phenomenon that becomes a challenge for various aspects of every segmentation in society and the state, then in this seminar the focus is on technosocial resilience which is basically an approach that combines concepts from sociology and more specifically as social studies, science and technology. Prof. Sulfikar started the lecture by discussing the concept of resilience. Resilience itself is a concept that describes something that is damaged but there is an attempt to restore or improve a situation for the better.

"There are three reasons why Resilience has received the attention of various countries and researchers, because first is the collective awareness that disasters are unavoidable, second is that there is a pattern or frequency of these disasters getting higher, and thirdly the impact is very broad," he said.

Prof. Sulfikar also explained that this epidemic cannot be separated from global and modern activities. If we see that Covid-19 is actually a local phenomenon in Wuhan, but because the market or Wuhan's economic activities are modern, the virus easily rides on technology such as passing planes and other technologies. Then he emphasized that resilience is a form of ability to recover from an epidemic or danger that occurs in an area to return to normal, then the faster and more efficient a country is to rehabilitate the situation, the better or the higher the outbreak resistance of the country.

Resilience in the last 10 years has become a phenomenon that is cool to discuss for scientists, because it can be attempted to solve a problem and carry out restoration in a country. then it can be used to predict if in the future there are similar problems they will find it easier to create existing disaster resilience models.

“If you look at it from the point of view of social science, a very good effort in doing resilience is social capital in a society. Because it has been empirically proven that trust and good communication in social capital will accelerate recovery after a disaster occurs. On the other hand, the book I took was Resilience Engineering, and this book provides engineering ideas that are more focused on infrastructure,” he said.

But he tried to build a connection between these two thoughts, because it was considered that both would be faster and more efficient if they were carried out in tandem. So he developed the concept of tech-social resilience. "This concept consists of two premises, the first is that disaster is not seen from an event but as a series of processes that occur in the technosocial area, secondly that resilience is a capacity that is built through building between social structures and technical structures," he said.

Then at the core of resilience is a tech-social construct that is influenced by infrastructure, institutions, political systems, culture and epistemological bases. Tech-social systems actually have levels and each has a different character. The stages start from the smallest scope, from micro, then meso, macro and meta. Every disaster that is contained in each level will have a different way, then of course after we understand the character of the existing problem, don't let the solution be not in accordance with the existing system or character.

Then in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic problem, we can see this from two perspectives, first as an ordinary natural phenomenon, and a social phenomenon. So the mitigation efforts that we can do are Medical Intervention (vaccine, testing, treatment) and Social Intervitations (social isolation and control). 

Prof. Sulfikar hopes that after experiencing shocks from this pandemic, Indonesia can become adaptive behavior where it can face the new normal which is better than the situation before this pandemic and of course has good resilience. (Fajar Nugraha).