"A huge social experiment":<strong> </strong>Postdigital Social Connectivity Under Lockdown Conditions

Chambers, D

doi:10.1163/9789004536418-004

"A huge social experiment": Postdigital Social Connectivity Under Lockdown Conditions

Lookup NU author(s): Professor Deborah Chambers ORCiD

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This is the authors' accepted manuscript of a book chapter that has been published in its final definitive form by Brill, 2023.

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Abstract

This chapter shows that reliance on digital media to maintain contact with family and friends rose and intensified during lockdown, albeit unevenly. Yet the amplified use of digital technologies by householders was less dramatic than expected. Data on levels of use confirm that most UK homes were already well resourced, enabling householders to migrate swiftly to full online communication. Nevertheless, the chapter argues that lockdown conditions triggered new communicative norms and protocols resulting from a surge in the domestic use of relatively new video call communication software. By activating visually oriented screen-based communication, described here as a form of scopic mediation, video call technology enabled online householders to 'get a visual' on remote family, friends and community members. Video call technology became a highly cherished resource that fostered a sense of shared time. Forcing householders to renegotiate relations between public and private space, these domestic adjustments reconfigured meanings of 'home' as an immobile yet dynamic timespace (see Barad, 2007). This now pervasive, trans-domestic social connectivity marks a new phase of domestic mediatization, one that can be called 'postdigital'. This phase heralds a new mode of sociality.