Pandemic Temporalities: Media Narratives of Temporal Crisis and the 'New Normal'


Martin Hand, Queen's University; Milana Leskovac, Queen's University

The sociotechnical, economic, and cultural disruptions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic have often been discussed in terms of a temporal crisis. For individuals, disruptions to routines precipitated feelings of boredom, ‘un-cannyness’ (Aho 2020), an ‘ungraspable’ and ‘odd’ sense of pandemic time, including a loss of purpose through a fundamental disruption of duration and temporal order (Verhage et al. 2021). Scholars have articulated the relatively common lockdown experience of engaging in continual digital streaming for work or leisure in terms of ‘suspended waiting’ (Ruse 2022), ‘dismal regularity’ (Shields et al. 2020), or ‘quarantime’ (Irons 2020), with many struggling to transform this into ‘normal’, ‘productive’, or ‘capitalist’ time (Suckert 2022) and avoid perpetual ‘doomscrolling’ (Ytre-Arne and Moe 2021). While these general feelings of disruption are well-documented, there has been no research looking at the specific role of media narratives in organizing and reinforcing these forms of ‘temporal crisis’. This paper is part of a larger project about how and in what ways established temporalities have been mediated, disrupted, and reconfigured in Canadian Society. Specifically, we report on one broad aim: to understand the dominant narratives, expectations, and normative conceptions of pandemic related temporal change in the Canadian context through two interrelated planes – legacy media narratives and social media accounts. This work is framed through interdisciplinary scholarship that examines the ambivalent yet constitutive roles that media play in the composition of temporalities (Gregg 2018; Keightley 2019; Wajcman 2019a), theorizations of time that take a polytemporal approach, emphasizing both the uneven distribution of temporal autonomies (Baraitser 2017; Sharma 2014) and the multiple ways that time is socially structured, differentiated and experienced (Jordheim and Ytreberg 2021; Rosa 2019).  To analyze dominant media narratives of the ‘new normal’ in temporal terms, we draw on two sets of preliminary media data. First, content analyses of 80 major Canadian news outlet editorials and articles between March 2020 to May 2022 to provide data on the dominant imaginaries, moralities, and expectations of temporal change constituting a generalized narrative of the ‘new normal’. We discuss how key accounts of temporal disintegration, dissonance, and management actually shifted over this period, between ‘slowing down’ and ‘speeding up’, and between temporal ‘crisis’ and ‘opportunity’. Second, to understand how some of those narratives were actually engaged with at the level of routine disruptions and adaptations, we focus on individual accounts of changes in ‘temporal autonomies’. Drawing from 502 comments collected from the subreddit r/Toronto – shared between April 2020 and December 2021 - we discuss how sudden changes to temporal autonomy were differentially ‘felt’, as related to the normative use of discretionary time and changes in work routines. We highlight how age, family composition, socioeconomic and health status, geographical location, and the temporal span of the phenomenon shaped these engagements and the differentiated negotiations of them. In considering these two thematic analyses together, we draw tentative conclusions concerning the multiple and variable roles that media played in shaping temporal expectations and experiences. First, common narratives of and knowledge about pandemic disruption and the ‘new normal’ were circulated and engaged within mainstream media. However, as these narratives interacted with individuals’ social location, as well as beliefs about the risk of the virus and the effectiveness of government policies, they produced a range of experiences and attitudes towards the suite of pandemic temporal changes. These ranged from beliefs in collective sacrifice and individual responsibility in controlling the spread of infection, fatigue and hopelessness in enduring the phenomenon, to defiance and non-compliance to pandemic rules. Second, digital media were often promoted and used as the primary means to rapidly re-synchronize routines (schooling, working) at the individual level, but in so doing, they appeared to further contribute to an increasingly pervasive disruption of boundaries between public/private domains. Finally, we observe how different forms of media are used dynamically to shape temporalities, and that individuals negotiate their lived realities with dominant narratives about temporal change to produce beliefs and attitudes about the effect of the pandemic on their autonomy.

Non-presenting author: Daniela Zuzunaga Zegarra, Queen's University

This paper will be presented at the following session: