Creating a New Normal? Technosocial Relations,Mundane Governance and Pandemic-Related Disruption in Everyday Life

Abstract

In many parts of the world, individuals and groups have managed significant disruptions prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic. This article draws on data collected through interviews with 40 Australia-based participants regarding their day-to-day routines and technological engagement as they navigated mobility restrictions intended to prevent the spread of the coronavirus disease. We use insights from Science and Technology Studies to shed light on how their technosocial relations enabled and regulated participants’ sociality while informing their desires for normalcy. Findings highlight perspectives and practices that diverge from popular framings of the pandemic as giving rise to a ‘new normal’. Instead, our analysis shows how human and non-human actors became inextricably linked in the management of everyday disruptions, illustrating forms of mundane governance. We conclude by reflecting on how Science and Technology Studies-informed approaches to the mundane glean important insight for the sociological study of the pandemic specifically and of everyday life generally.

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic is widely recognised as a significant global disruption that impinged on people’s everyday lives (Linnitt, 2020). Within these discourses, technology has often appeared as a valuable tool for coping with these effects (Anderson et al., 2021). For example, as mobility restrictions intended to prevent viral transmission affected people’s ability to socialise, study and work, many media narratives drew attention to how digital platforms aided in managing new routines, enabled continued social interactions and supported the need to access and share information (e.g. Bennett and Grant, 2020; Lobdell, 2021). These shifts have been popularly described as part of a ‘new normal’ or ‘new normalities’ spurred by the pandemic (Corpuz, 2021; Moretti and Maturo, 2021).

Sociologists and Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars warn that sweeping narratives can obfuscate the dynamic practices and meanings of everyday life, particularly in relation to technology. Such analyses suggest these ‘new normals’ are not simply about technological adaption; environments and practices have changed as individuals, communities and governments navigate various risks associated with the pandemic (Lupton and Lewis, 2022). This analysis follows Hine’s (2020: 27) advice to query the taken-for-granted nature of technosocial relations and infrastructures, which are often ‘designed not to be noticed’, as they relate to pandemic-related disruption. In describing them as technosocial, we acknowledge and extend frameworks that fuse social interactionist traditions with the recognition of technology’s social embeddedness (Ito and Obakue, 2005). Individuals’ technosocial lives reflect how ‘technology and society continually, subtly, almost invisibly shape one another’ (Chayko, 2014: 985). As such, studies of everyday life should attend to the agency of technological actors and aim to understand how these constitutive relationships and networks shape the conditions of lived experience (Law, 1992). In this article, we build on earlier STS-informed work to examine how disruption manifested in everyday life during the pandemic, considering how technosociality featured within quotidian rituals and routines.

This article traces how technosocial relations shifted during the first 20 months of the pandemic in Australia – a time when governments implemented significant restrictions to prevent the spread of the SARS-COV-2 virus. Instead of approaching disruption as a singular exogenous shock or the basis of a ‘new normal’, we follow advice from STS scholars who contend that focusing on context alone does not provide ‘sufficient explanations of what is happening’ (Woolgar and Lezaun, 2013: 327). Framings of context that emphasise environmental factors can negate not only how non-human actors, such as technology, are agentive, but also how both human and non-human actors are ‘always and already constitutively part of these phenomena’ (Woolgar and Neyland, 2013: 19; see also de Laet and Mol, 2000). Our findings illustrate how Australia-based participants understood their increased technological engagement during the pandemic as both enabling and disruptive. We argue these practices took shape not as a direct process of individuals developing new normals in response to external shocks but as mundane technosocial negotiations.

In the pages that follow, we foreground our analysis with a discussion of how STS-informed approaches to mundanity offer productive modes of sociologically analysing everyday life. We then discuss our participants’ characterisations of their technological practices and their accounts of everyday disruptions and normalcy, which illuminate how objects and technosocial practices came to have significant influence in their lives. The differences in these framings illustrate the processing and enactment of technosocial relations, as evinced by participants’ beliefs and feelings about mundane objects and technologies of pandemic governance. We conclude by reflecting on how this STS-informed approach to the mundane gleans important insight for the sociological study of the pandemic specifically and of everyday life generally.

Technosocial Relations and the Governance of Everyday Life

Everyday life is ‘at the centre of human existence’, making it a significant focus for social science research and analysis (Pink, 2012: 143). The sociological study of everyday life has made rich contributions within and beyond the discipline; key writers in the area include germinal sociologists, such as Erving Goffman (Back, 2015). For example, Smart’s (2007) analysis of ‘personal life’ illuminates how the study of everyday life, including one’s emotional responses, intimate associations and valued possessions, is essential for understanding how societal changes manifest as lived experience. In a similar vein, Komter (2001) and Sayer (2011) draw attention to how values attributed to seemingly mundane things can aid in understanding cultural, ethical, personal and symbolic meanings as well as the social relationships that shape them. Such work showcases the importance of examining society beyond structural framings to consider how it operates as a ‘moving and dynamic entity’ (Back, 2015: 820). The shifting conditions and responses spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic reinforce the relevance of this point.

While day-to-day occurrences may seem ‘unremarkable’ and even ‘unimportant’, Back (2015: 834) emphasises their value for making sense of ‘public issues’, which enable connecting ‘the smallest story to the largest social transformation’. Neal and Murji (2015: 813) extend this observation, contending that micro-level observations can enrich understandings of social changes often framed abstractly, such as conflict, climate change, globalisation, industrialisation and intersecting inequities. In other words, the mundane is an important domain for unveiling and tracing details that can be underappreciated when working at other scales of analysis. Its discursive contours can influence collective social dynamics and wider societal shifts (Merelman, 1998). Thus, following Pink et al. (2017: 1), we examine the mundane as ‘the usually unnoticed and below the surface everyday routines, contingencies and accomplishments that both shape and emerge through our engagements’ – in this case, with digital technologies.

Through a focus on everyday life, we highlight overlooked governance relationships in a country that received significant attention for its ‘COVID-zero’ policies early in the pandemic. STS scholars argue that studying ‘ordinary stuff’ can shed light on everyday instances of ‘being regulated and controlled by such mundane objects and technologies’ – what Woolgar and Neyland (2013: 3) refer to as mundane governance. The crux of mundane governance is to embrace an ‘under-the-skin approach’ to analysing seemingly unremarkable activities, looking at how quotidian relations generate important modes of governance and accountability (Woolgar and Lezaun, 2013: 328). Akin to sociological contentions, this focus considers how localised practices and adaptation are ‘co-constitutive of the wider complexities’ underpinning ‘contemporary social worlds’ (Neal and Murji, 2015: 812). Our particular interest here is to show how technosocial relations illustrate how non-human actors constitutively come to etch and shape everyday experience – in short, how they come to have significant regulatory influence.

Our analysis reflects foundational STS tenets in that it rejects technological determinist framings, which, while prevalent in other fields, overstate the capacity of technology for wider social change (Bijker, 1995; Wyatt, 2008). Such characterisations often depart from on-the-ground technosocial practices. Our analysis aligns with observations associated with Actor-Network Theory (ANT), which posit that ‘people are mediated through objects of one kind or another’ (Law, 1992: 381–382, emphasis in original). Employing this lens, we offer new insights for studies of pandemic governance, which have focused primarily on formal regulations and compliance (e.g. Murphy, 2020; Six et al., 2023). Although attentive to ritualistic routines, regulatory governance tends to relate these insights to how participants understand and respond to engrained norms, official rules and regulators (e.g. Braithwaite, 1995; Braithwaite et al., 1994). While our data captures participants’ stated actions and attitudes towards authority, it more prominently illuminates a shared set of mundane practices linked to the ‘infrastructures required for public aspects of life’ (Pink et al., 2017: 4).

We are, of course, not the first to draw on STS insights or to use mundanity as a lens for understanding societal changes. Rinkinen et al. (2015) emphasise the importance of everyday object relations, which, as they suggest, require close examination of people’s explanations of their day-to-day activities. Their findings highlight how participants encounter, enact and evaluate object relations, both actively and passively. Other studies examining the mundane provide insights into technosocial relations that constitute healthcare contexts (Buse et al., 2018), forms of political expression (Murru and Vicari, 2021) and self-tracking practices (Pink et al., 2017). More recently, researchers have captured the significance of mundane dynamics during the COVID-19 pandemic using different STS frameworks. They include, for example, explanations of how individuals using digital communication technologies become part of ‘human–digital-home assemblages’ that enable sociality at a distance (Watson et al., 2021: 137), ANT analyses of how community-based organisations co-ordinate and navigate COVID-19 risk reduction strategies (Frimpong et al., 2022) and feminist non-human ontological accounts that elucidate the agency of pandemic objects, such as face masks and toilet paper (Sikka, 2021). Such studies also highlight the key role of technologies in enabling intimacy and social connection (Lupton, 2022; Lupton et al., 2021; Watson et al., 2021). Our examination reveals additional insights: although participants recognise technologies as helpful at times, they often convey limited awareness of technologies in action – even as these objects exercise regulatory influence in daily activities.

Data and Methods

Our findings are from a qualitative study conducted from October 2020 through 2021, which consisted of semi-structured interviews with 40 Australian participants. Recruitment of participants took place through the researchers’ social and professional networks, social media circulation and chain referral. Our approach to sampling did not discriminate by demographic, though did seek to capture a diverse group of people from across Australia. Our goal was not to compare distinct groups but to elicit a range of perspectives on the pandemic. Interested individuals completed a short screening questionnaire so that the study team could ensure the involvement of participants from different educational, ethnic and generational backgrounds.

Participants’ ages ranged from 18 to 80, with a high proportion living in large Australian cities (Canberra, Sydney, Melbourne). This concentration in urban areas enabled us to capture reflections on everyday conditions in lockdown, a key concern as Australian states and cities experienced varying lengths and levels of restrictions. For example, Melbourne and Sydney experienced the longest and most stringent restrictions, including prolonged stay-at-home orders that necessitated remote schooling and work. ¹ In contrast, Perth, located in Western Australia, permitted more internal mobility, as the state had rigid rules around interstate travel, including prohibiting non-essential visitors. Our recruitment strategy resulted in more women than men (65%) but included residents who were born and raised in Australia as well as those who were born overseas and/or had immediate family living outside the country, including from Asia, Europe and South America. Participants also worked in a variety of professions, including administration, care work, government, hospitality and retail, technical fields and trades, as well as retirees and students, with six of them losing employment during the pandemic. To protect confidentiality, we use pseudonyms and only present relevant demographic information when quoting them.

Participants received a gift card (AU$25) for taking part. During interviews, which lasted 60 to 75 minutes, we asked about the role technology played in their lives during the pandemic. Even participants with limited access to technology prior to the pandemic increased their use while managing restrictions. Although we allowed interviewees to convey their understandings of managing external shocks, including through engagement with traditional or novel technologies, specific inquiries targeted the nature of their technosocial relationships to foreground them in this study. This method reflects Hine’s (2020) recognition that the mundane often remains invisible and thus unremarked upon. We adopted her recommendation to make ‘special efforts to uncover those silences’, and we incorporated topics about technological artefacts and infrastructures within more holistic discussions of everyday pandemic experiences to avoid the limitation of ‘artificially isolating particular technologies’ (2020: 27). We scrutinised where silences and the spoken converged, attending to affective and practical dimensions and focusing on how the mundane emerged as profound. We used a combination of direct and indirect questioning to unearth how participants engaged with, responded to and perceived their technosocial engagement.

Our interviews covered how participants described their relationships with information, services and technology as they navigated restrictions. The first subset of questions explored how they accessed information about the COVID-19 pandemic (from the nature of the virus to preventative measures and resources) and how they reflected on object relations and strategies related to access, public messaging and reliability. The second subset of questions probed participants’ perspectives on their experiences with various pandemic-related services (from financial support programmes to food delivery). Finally, we dove deeper into their views about their technosocial practices, specifically their engagement with new technologies (e.g. government COVID-tracking apps) and technologies used daily (e.g. mobile phones, videoconferencing).

We recorded interviews with participants’ consent, arranged for them to be professionally transcribed and used NVivo (Version 12) to support deeper familiarisation with the data and initial code generation. We held regular meetings to discuss and develop analytic themes collectively drawn from the data and to reflect on our roles in conducting interviews and in generating the findings (Braun and Clarke, 2019). After agreeing that semantic codes (explicit, on the surface) and latent codes (tacit, underlying beliefs and ideologies) crystallised around participants’ understandings of and practices with technology, we adopted a more abductive approach to interpreting the data (Tavory and Timmermans, 2014). We iteratively revisited analytical themes of technosocial adaptation and disruption, as they were prominent in reflections on everyday life. The process helped us to identify statements that aligned with insights about mundanity and technology, informing the argument and structure of this article and other analyses (Deejay et al., 2023). The findings presented here resonate across a diverse sample but are limited in that they cannot be extrapolated to explain differences between demographic groups or possible changes following the lifting of most COVID-19 restrictions in 2022.

Adopting Technology to Manage Pandemic-Related Changes

People often adopt technologies to manage breakdowns during crisis – for instance, the use of social networking platforms during disasters (Castillo, 2016; Reuter et al., 2018). When asked to discuss their engagement with technologies, participants often described them as instruments for achieving specific goals. They framed them as significant for keeping up with periodic activities, accessing COVID-19 information and maintaining social contact when government mandates restricted public gatherings and travel. In detailing technologies and the extent of their usage, participants reflected on the changing conditions of their domestic and work lives, including how they managed personal circumstances alongside official messaging about coronavirus-related data, mandates and services. While such framings rendered participants in positions of control over technologies they used, further scrutiny of their technosocial relations would complicate that characterisation.

Interviews highlighted the new and ‘outsized’ role of videoconferencing in everyday life, as they enabled connections to family, friends and work colleagues while at home in isolation. Comments by Sophia, a woman who engaged many clients using similar modalities as part of her work in procurement, capture this reliance:

With my family, this year was the first year that we were celebrating all the birthdays online, and we did it using WhatsApp. And, also, my inner family, like with my brother and my sister and my mum, it was through WhatsApp. But with the extended family, with all my cousins and aunties and uncles and all that stuff, with them, it’s through Zoom. But yeah . . . we didn’t do these kinds of meetings before COVID.

Using these technologies – which many participants described as tools – stemmed from their personal risk assessments of contracting the virus in public spaces and lockdown mandates.

Although participants described a significant uptake in videoconferencing, particularly Zoom, they primarily framed these platforms as substitutes for in-person routines, such as general chats, face-to-face classes, office meetings and community gatherings. As explained by another woman in her 30s, ‘I would do just normal telephone calls, but during the pandemic I found we were using these video calls a bit more because we wanted people interaction, even if it was just on video.’ The ability to see others, to use Watson et al.’s (2021: 141) language, it felt ‘more human’. Many participants described its importance, helping them manage the isolation they felt during the pandemic. With screen time substituting face-to-face interaction, the affordances of digital technologies formed an intimate part of activities that participants presented as essential to their pre-pandemic everyday lives. This appreciation was especially true among older participants who conveyed finding value in feeling compelled to learn how to ‘zoom’ given the circumstances, as it expanded their ability to pursue ‘intimacy and sociality at a distance’ (Watson et al., 2021: 147). Our older participants used technology to transcend what Neves et al. (2023: 126) describe as ‘new spatialities of loneliness’ emerging from home confinement. Technologies such as teleconferencing became a means to connect with the outside world, helping them to mitigate lockdown-exacerbated feelings of loneliness.

Despite recognising the value of videoconferencing tools, participants described them as poor substitutes for in-person communication, conveying an eagerness to no longer engage with these tools once ‘things returned to normal’ and mobility restrictions ended. As Charlotte, a receptionist in her late 20s, explained,

We have family Zoom meetings, like the extended family, my aunties and uncles and stuff and my grandparents, once a month, twice a month. But again, it’s not the same. Grandma can hardly hear when you’re standing right next to her. Shouting through an iPad definitely doesn’t help.

Akin to other participants’ comments, Charlotte conveyed a general appreciation of technology to enable social connection during periods of lockdown but expressed dissatisfaction – and at times fatigue and frustration – in relying on them. Digital infrastructure’s mediating influence had direct effects on experiences of intimacy and sociality. Some gave specific reasons for feeling this way, including technological deficiencies, such as a poor internet connection or regular technical glitches, the inability of videoconferencing to replicate the full sensory experience of co-present interactions and the monotony of screen-based interactions. More generally, though, participants were less specific. Their technology-oriented concerns were subsumed by expressions of a general weariness of being confined at home. In fact, Zoom was very much a part of the overarching narrative surrounding pandemic disruptions, a point we return to later.

While participants most often raised the subject of videoconferencing platforms, they also referenced computers, streaming services and television as everyday substitutes for restricted in-person social activities. Online gaming emerged as one such modality. Consider, for example, how two men of different ages described how online gaming enabled connecting to social networks during extended periods of lockdown in Melbourne:

I did video game before the pandemic, but it definitely increased a lot during the pandemic because I had nothing else to do . . . A few of my friends also video gamed a lot, turned to video gaming and we just sort of hung out in that way. (Paul, teenage student)

I’m not a person that likes sending text messages or even phone calls. I’m more of a face-to-face person, so I lost contact with some local friends, but at the same time, possibly ironically, I got in contact with this friend from . . . playing Xbox. I spend probably more time on a phone call throughout a video game with this friend that I normally don’t talk to that much than with local friends that I was missing and wanting to see after the lockdowns were over. (Leo, professional in his 30s)

Whereas many women discussed playing face-to-face games with household members, these two participants used videogame playing during the pandemic to recreate some social dimensions of pre-pandemic everyday life. Akin to recent scholarship on video gaming during the pandemic crisis, their reflections evince how these practices can support and even strengthen social bonds (see Boldi et al., 2022). Although important, video gaming had a mediating influence on their sociality. For Leo, it not only shaped how he contacted people but also whom he engaged with, altering his relationships.

Although participants often acknowledged how technologies were central to their daily routines in lockdown, many of them did not reflect further on their technosocial relationships. Their responses were more pragmatic in nature, describing material details of technologies or the specificities of how they used them. While some understood our questions about technology as limited to practical characteristics, others had internalised these practices as taken for granted and did not engage beyond matter-of-fact statements about their technosocial relations. Even early in the pandemic, participants showed an acceptance of these infrastructures as commonplace, revealing Starr’s (1999) observation that infrastructure often goes unnoticed until it does not work in the way people expect. This lack of recognition, however, does not suggest it lacks influence; rather, it is mundane to the extent it often goes unnoticed.

Our direct queries yielded insightful observations about technosocial dynamics in everyday life. Participants’ descriptions capture how their engagement with technologies constitutively produced their pandemic routines, as their modes of accessing information and resources became central to recreating their schedules and social worlds. Technosocial negotiations emerged as foundational, with participants from various backgrounds valuing these practices, even though they often characterised them as a tedious aspect of everyday life:

I was definitely watching a lot more TV and probably spending a lot more time on my phone. Whether it was just looking at news sites or whether I was just playing around on social media or messaging friends and family and stuff like that, because of having more time, I was wasting it by using technology or things like that. (Ben, carpenter in his mid-30s)

The QR code has been on my phone for quite a while . . . so long as my mobile is not out of battery in the bottom of my handbag, I just use that and, you know, don’t even sort of think about it anymore. (Audrey, retiree in her 70s)

Such reflections were common. They reflected how technologies were central to daily activities and sociality, becoming, as Audrey explains, normalised within routines.

Interestingly, pandemic-related technologies – including COVID-19 apps, face masks, QR codes and telehealth – did not stand out as central components of everyday life. Based on other socio-material analysis of pandemic artefacts, such as Lupton et al.’s (2021) work on the mask, we expected participants to reflect critically or emotionally on these objects and infrastructures since they were new and often foregrounded in narratives regarding the tensions of pandemic governance. Instead, our participants situated them as just another aspect of the pandemic that needed to be incorporated and managed. They were not magnified or highlighted as distinctly significant compared with other technologies, and they often emerged as divorced from participants’ perspectives on authority and government regulation. While seemingly novel, they became mundane within participants’ technosocial relations.

These framings align with research on how technology can become so thoroughly embedded that it is seemingly invisible (Hine, 2020; Tolmie et al., 2003). Although specific objects remained visible to participants, pandemic-related responses in the form of technosocial infrastructure emerged as ubiquitous. Various participants repeated expressions that conveyed this sentiment, such as ‘having nothing else left to do’, ‘I just found myself [doing]’ and ‘don’t even sort of think about it anymore’. The pervasiveness of this language revealed that many participants situated themselves as passive actors adapting to and coping with new technosocial relations instigated by pandemic-related measures. These depictions emerged in stark contrast to other characterisations describing technologies as tools they used. These reflections attributed both agency – and even control – to non-human actors, the contours of which became clearer when we asked more general questions about participants’ pandemic desires and experiences. In the next section, we consider how these responses were interconnected with their subjective understandings of disruption and normalcy.

Understanding Disruption through Everyday Technosocial Life

If everyday life is marked by ‘habits, routines and stable practices’ (van Tienoven et al., 2017: 749) then it reasons that disruption unsettles them. This capacity to upset the rhythms of daily life can make visible previously taken-for-granted actions and performances (Woolgar and Neyland, 2013). Teasing out where disruption manifested in everyday life proved to be analytically valuable, as participants reflected on their technosocial relations in ways that departed from their pragmatic descriptions of technology. Even though technology was an unspoken element within this subset of interview questions, participants described various technosocial strategies for coping with and navigating the turbulent forces of the pandemic. Their explanations conveyed an awareness of distinct and diverse forms of disruption, which participants often juxtaposed with descriptions of normalcy.

Some technologies emerged as themselves disruptive, manifested as technical failures, destabilised pre-pandemic routines or the impetus for participants to seek or develop new forms of technical knowledge. As demonstrated by two participants from different backgrounds and locations, many interviewees shared stories of adjusting to become more dependent on digital communication technology:

To learn what it can do is really time consuming. Having to learn Zoom and it’s not working, and then I get my husband to help me, because I’m just, I’m not, you know, fully up on everything to work my way around. But then once I do, I’ve got those skills, so I can troubleshoot a bit better. (Jenny, retiree from Perth)

We’re doing a lot more online interaction with people, a lot more. There’s a lot involved in that. There’s networking technology. You’ve got to have bigger screens, and you’ve got to have . . . you don’t really need better computers, but you need better bandwidth. It’s mostly about bandwidth and networking. It’s not about a better computer. (Joseph, aged-care worker from Sydney)

Although emphasising technical dimensions, both recognise technologies’ capacity and the need to adjust to their terms. In other words, they acknowledged non-human agency, even when speaking about technologies as tools for human use. Identified disruptions exacerbated instabilities but also incentivised adaptation.

These mediated dynamics contributed to how participants narrated disruption, which they conveyed in relational terms. They compared the disruption felt in everyday life with what they understood about circumstances in other households, cities, states or countries based on either media or other people’s accounts. Many comparatively calibrated everyday concerns about potential breakdowns and risks, a practice enabled by information accessed through news, communication applications and social media networks. As Jude, a writer in her 60s, told us, ‘I suppose overall, compared with other countries, we’re very lucky.’

Relational accounts often referenced the everyday lives of people in participants’ close networks. Some claimed to feel fortunate compared with the domestic, economic or social situations of colleagues, friends or family. For others, contact enabled through digital networks affirmed their perspectives of disruption, including how it was being overseen by authorities and affecting their lives. For instance, Ben and Grace, both in their early 30s and based in rural locations, had different relational understandings of other lockdown situations:

I would say that we’re quite lucky overall that we haven’t been impacted as significantly as a lot of people. I know a lot of people who’ve lost their livelihoods and jobs and a lot of things. It’s a different place out here in the country than it is in the city, for sure. (Ben)

A lot of my friends, I would say, don’t think that it’s an issue, but I think the restrictions that have been put into place are very arbitrary and hypocritical, especially in the sense of being able to go to shops without too much social distancing, but events aren’t allowed, and gatherings aren’t allowed in the homes. So, a lot of the conversations have been around how unfair these restrictions are. (Grace)

These participants did not dwell on the influence of technosocial forces, even when they acknowledged using various technological means to access information. Although technology was seemingly silent in the sense it was not formally recognised, it was nonetheless agentive in shaping their narratives and perspectives.

When acknowledged, digital communication technologies emerged as symbolic markers of broader experiences of disruption. Consider, for example, how Carrie, a mother from Melbourne, recounted how pandemic-related adaptations changed the nature of her daughter’s birthday celebrations:

It wasn’t how you picture things. It’s not how you picture the first year of your first child’s life, and you don’t ever picture that that’s how you’d be spending their first birthday . . . Yes, obviously she’s not impacted, because she doesn’t really know any different. Zoom calls start becoming normal. Yes, it was quite upsetting, but I just tried to see the positive, that it was only temporary, and she’s not going to remember anyway, and the second birthday will be a lot different, and then just trying to do what we can to celebrate with the restrictions that we have.

Her comment, an exemplar of responses related to valued rituals, captures the strong emotional response to an aspect of everyday life perceived as being threatened by adaptation to a new practice. As researchers have traced how habits, milestones and rituals inform future expectations (Gasparini, 2004; Mandich, 2020), this seemingly minor adjustment constitutes a significant disruption. The portent of a new normal – in this case, the reliance on Zoom for key life events – presents a fundamental challenge to accepted practices and rhythms of everyday life, upsetting quotidian expectations. Carrie’s affective references to these dynamics as being ‘temporary’ reflect her attempt to manage her feelings in the present and expectations for the future.

Across interviews, the prospect of certain pandemic-induced technosocial practices becoming normal in perpetuity became a proxy for broader anxieties about the consequences of lockdown mandates and ongoing periods of isolation. The idea of regular and increased screen time replacing face-to-face activities provoked concern among participants. Their visceral responses spanned anger, discomfort and displeasure, and their words captured their struggles for control over mundane aspects of everyday life. In doing so, participants revealed an awareness of mundane governance, which was often expressed as resentment towards technologies reshaping valued practices. Despite an appreciation of technosocial relations mitigating pandemic-related disruption in other instances, participants saw them as disruptors to once stable practices. In fact, many of them conveyed a fervent desire to establish some semblance of normalcy – often framing it as a space where technologies were absent, which we discuss next.

Desiring Normalcy in the Absence of Technology

When discussing possible long-term changes spurred by the pandemic, most participants evaded in-depth discussions of a new normal in which working from home and technological dependence would be commonplace. Instead, they spoke about notions of normalcy that reflected their pre-pandemic everyday life. Tanya, a woman in her early 40s living alone, outlined how her day-to-day activities during lockdown periods formed what she understood as being the opposite of normalcy:

There was no normalcy. Not being able to leave your house for more than an hour a day, having an 8 p.m. curfew, not being able to leave your five-kilometre radius, only being able to go to three places – the supermarket, pharmacy and [to] see the doctor. There’s just no way that you can have any normal life. Unless you hang out with your friends at the supermarket, there’s no way to have a normal interaction. People would use the House Party app to video call with people, or Zoom calls, but it’s not the same thing. It’s not normality to chat to your friends in a group chat online, and I find that that is a draining medium as opposed to an energising medium that you would have when you’re in person with a group of people.

Tanya found the interference of mandated restrictions on daily routines and rhythms as the primary barrier to creating a sense of normalcy. Although reticent to speak about technology when asked directly, it became clear that she felt many technologies influenced her everyday activities, evincing how a mundane focus on disruption does ‘reveal the unnoticed’ (Woolgar and Neyland, 2013: 221). Like other participants, she saw a normal routine as not involving videoconferencing or group chats with friends, even though these practices were not necessarily novel prior to the pandemic. A common sentiment was anxiety about pandemic-induced technosocial relations becoming normalised without options for regular in-person engagement.

Many participants echoed Tanya’s feelings when discussing normalcy, qualifying how they wanted technologies to feature in daily activities. Participants based in Melbourne, which had the longest periods of lockdown in Australia, conveyed particularly strong feelings about wanting a form of normalcy in which they felt more agency in their technosocial relations:

I do believe, though, that once things kind of get back to normal, and I can get into work the only time I’ll really be using, for example, my computer specifically will be when I’m Facetiming with my partner, and we watch a movie together. I think I’m going to take a good amount of time away from it. (Leila, woman in her early 20s)

I think it’s more now the time to get away from technology a little bit and try to live more – like going out more, visiting more people now that we can do it, being outdoors more . . . Remember how life was when we went out, when we could go other places, what I used to do in a normal week when I could go to the university, that I could take the train, could go for a coffee and I was – it took me one week for me to start slowly going to a normal life. (Maria, woman in her 40s)

This tendency to associate pervasive digital technologies with pandemic uncertainties and tensions emerged across interviews, though it appeared to be more pronounced among Melbourne-based participants who had to rely on technologies for longer periods of time due to stay-at-home measures. Assertions about recalibrating the use of technology were central to an imagined post-COVID-19 normalcy, revealing an underlying desire for control over – and even freedom from – technosocial relations that took shape during the pandemic.

Participants often conveyed a sense that these object relations dominated core aspects of their lives. They saw them as entangled with the need to navigate COVID-19 risk and government directives. While some presented mundane pre-pandemic habits as mitigating strategies, others desired spaces of normalcy divorced from digital technologies:

I still work, which is good. That’s a good normalcy. I actually started doing yoga, so during my lunch break I would do 20 minutes of yoga pretty much every day. That’s pretty normal. (Wei, student in her 30s)

As long as it wasn’t raining, I would still get outside and get some fresh air. And just trying to fill the day, I guess, rather than just sitting around. So, whatever we can do. Go outside to the backyard if the weather was nice. Bit of coffee as well. That was like a normal part of my day-to-day life prior to the lockdown. (Carrie)

My basic, normal day would be to – I live opposite a beach, so I would have a swim here and there when I figured we’re allowed out. (Ben)

Participants narrated everyday activities, interests and routines that not only suggest a valuing of banality, calmness and simplicity without technology, but also locate many of them outside the home and doing physical activity – something that was limited during periods of lockdown. Evoking practices that seemed unachievable early in the pandemic, their comments revealed negative associations with technosocial relations characteristic of prolonged periods in home isolation and quarantine.

Participants’ notions of pre- and post-crisis normalcy often oriented around reclaiming the terms of mundanity in their lives. Within that reclaiming emerged a resistance to new digital practices and routines, as many participants conveyed feeling dominated by the technologies used to navigate restrictions. These tacit acknowledgements of objects’ agency were not limited to digital technologies, however, as captured by how Tanya described her pandemic living arrangements:

I live in a building, and there’s 400 people in the building. Every lift has information on [preventative measures]. It’s everywhere. You can’t leave your house without seeing signage. You can’t go anywhere without hand sanitiser. There’s hand sanitiser in the lift. There’s hand sanitiser in every single business here. It’s omnipresent. There are signs everywhere. There’s 1.5 metres distancing. There’s places where you can stand with stickers in Melbourne. You go to a park, they’ve drawn circles, bubble circles, where you can sit. It’s omnipresent. There’s no escaping it.

Tanya’s awareness of mundane governance is acute even though she does not use that language. She acknowledges how objects have the power to govern and shape human experience. Like other participants, her narrations of technosocial relations were most nuanced when the impacts of these non-human actors were understood as disruptive to a desired normalcy.

The tendency to omit technology from framings of normalcy was indicative of participants’ inability to disentangle pandemic-related tensions from shifting technosocial practices, which many perceived as an uncontrollable amplification of digital technology. The dominance of digital interactions became emblematic of how they understood the crisis and was significant in terms of how participants demarcated everyday life as ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ the time of the pandemic. Even in this framing, mundane objects, including technologies, appeared differentially – as silent and invisible aspects of the infrastructure of everyday life or as disruptive and disorderly when seen to be working to the contrary. Participants’ desires for the future were not simply about a virus-free existence. They oriented around reclaiming agency within their technosocial relations, wanting them to resemble their previously established rhythms, rituals and routines where these objects seemed silent and invisible. It was only through these quotidian accounts that participants concretely expressed feelings of intrusion from the perceived dominance of technologies in their day-to-day activities.

Conclusion

The mundane is an essential domain for cultivating deeper understandings of digital technologies as embedded aspects of contemporary social worlds (Pink et al., 2017). This article has explored how Australians navigated and understood changing technosocial relations amid government-enacted pandemic restrictions, highlighting formations of mundane governance in which participants’ notions of disruption and normalcy took shape in complicated and relational ways. While technosocial adaptations offered coping mechanisms, they also fostered significant sites of disruption in participants’ everyday lives. As technologies took on new functions during the COVID-19 crisis, they became formative in influencing participants’ attitudes, expectations and practices, including their expressed desires to exercise greater agency and control. Despite appreciating the capacity of technology to enable social connection, participants often struggled with a sense of domination that was inextricably linked to technosocial engagement. Specific technologies prompted strong affective responses that were linked to their ubiquity during home isolation. For example, Zoom, a central platform mediating pandemic technosociality, became understood as an invasive presence and inadequate substitute for face-to-face sociality. These objects were more than material or symbolic markers of participants’ everyday lives; they were core to their constitution and had a profound regulatory influence felt by participants as they assessed their pandemic conditions.

These findings evidence what sociologists of the everyday have long observed: how the ‘small’ and ‘big’ co-constitute each other in shaping how individuals and groups are governed (Neal and Murji, 2015). In this case, societal context has an important explanatory role; it had a cascading effect that contributed to breaking down established habits and practices by disrupting the infrastructures of participants’ everyday lives. Although this sudden shift reverberated through technosocial relations, it does not capture participants’ endeavours to mitigate and repair their routines – concerns that research on mundanity reveals as central to human–digital co-existence (Pink et al., 2018). Accordingly, this examination of mundane governance attests that pandemic-related disruptions were powerful not simply because they were widespread, but because they were felt and negotiated close to home.

The study of mundanity illuminates limitations in explanations that narrowly attribute social change to large-scale forces or technological deterministic change. Future research should take seriously how the mundane is a primary arena in which people cultivate meaning, particularly in times of crisis. The contributions of this work support those agendas, offering analytic guidance for approaching the study of ongoing societal shifts. Implementing Hine’s (2020) recommendations for reflexively researching technosocial relations requires developing strategies that resist technological deterministic framings. While our direct questions about technologies elicited framings that cast them as tools for human use, encouraging participants to reflect more holistically about their circumstances unveiled more nuanced dynamics in which technologies operated as actors that had notable regulatory influence in everyday life. Creating spaces for participants to convey affective sentiments, including when technology seemed silent or not visible, facilitated a deeper understanding of their emergent perceptions of normalcy. Though the role of technology may seem less prominent in later phases of the pandemic, technosocial relations remain relevant. In Australia, protests against pandemic-related restrictions and the lifting of government mandates in 2022 may appear distinct from our findings, but they resonate with participants’ desires for freedom from pandemic conditions and control of their circumstances. As people continue to rebuild and re-envision their everyday infrastructure, paying critical attention to the mundane and its embedded technosocial features promises to provide important insights into ongoing and longitudinal societal shifts.