Mediatization, post-truth, and knowledge production about Covid-19 253 arguments, in short, relate to this movement of authorizing or authenticating the enunciator’s speech through his lived experi- ence. A new epistemological regime based on testimony emerg- es: testimony, in contemporary times, seems to be replacing the scientific method of verification and the truth. Experience as a place of truth has undeniably taken a central role. The mediatization of the testimonial ethos emphasizes a new testimonial logic, centered on the individual’s articulation with his image. That is, such a process does not turn the charac- ter of the enunciator into an image (due to the concreteness of the argumentation and presence before the enunciatees, in clas- sical rhetoric), but produces the enunciator himself as an image (due to the virtualization of presence and argumentation, in mediatized rhetoric). There is an increasing need to be an image, to produce oneself as an image, to be able to speak about oneself and to have reliable speech: mediatized enunciators will only be, being images. It’s as if they only existed – were believable – in the media. The image and its visibility production regimes (in the press, on television, in the cinema and on the internet) gain a new dimension in the social fabric when they are not just means of turning the other and oneself into images, but above all when they configure the ambience in which individuals produce identities, subjectivities, and intersections. As we will discuss further ahead, there is a new organization of our relationship with truth and reality, deeply marked by the belief in images (especially when they enact intimate life not only as content, but also as form – editing, set of scenes, scenographic elements, im- age quality, whether amateur or not). There is a new regime of veridiction, such as the production of a real effect as a real-life effect through the images. After all, the experience, especially in its testimonial dimension, assumed such an authenticity value that it guarantees a greater “real-life effect”, by talking about oneself, in the first person, in a personal account of what one has lived. In other words, the performance of personal suffering, in the context of mediatized society, has been used to support certain statements about life itself, supported by cultural con- ventions that value the authenticity of suffering insofar as they are converted into images, sounds and other media signs (SAC- RAMENTO; BORGES, 2017). Thus, if someone suffers or has suf-
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