Classification is about segmenting or orienting toward the world (Bowker and Star, 1999; Goodwin 1994). When a new pathogen wreaked havoc on the social ordinariness, crisis classifications become critical for the public to make sense of the world. This study traces crisis classifications in mobility—i.e., processes of making crisis classifications circulable—across COVID-19 press conferences in Taiwan. The mobility moved from uncertainty to certainty as health officials and journalists negotiated whether the first death of COVID-19 constituted a sign of community infection or community spread. Understanding the processes of category production and dissemination has implications for effectively communicating public crisis.

I analyze the interaction between health journalists and public health officials at press conferences in Taiwan and the public reception of this interaction. The data are from a corpus of 785 videos of COVID press conferences, yielding about 609 hours of recordings. Focusing on the first COVID death, I investigate the multiparty participation framework (Goffman, 1981) that includes online comments (i.e., YouTube live chat) and offline interactions (i.e., press conferences). I adopt multimodal discourse analysis to study metadiscourse (Gordon, 2023) and pragmatic gestures (Kendo, 2004; Streeck, 2009) that foreground health officials’ endeavor to resolve classification disputes.  

The analysis revealed how two categories—community infection and community spread—were deconstructed and reconstructed in a semiotic assemblage of gestures, metadiscourse, and corporeal participation. Specifically, officials deployed metadiscourse and pragmatic gestures to render some categories circulable and dismiss others. Journalists used metadiscourse to push forward candidate categories and animate conflicting accounts given by local experts and a global superpower. Online public viewers provided critical comments. Some questioned the ulterior motives of the journalists, and others were confounded by the technical explanations offered by the authorities. Classifications in mobility capture these challenges of deconstructing and reconstructing categories in building public consensus.