Mediated immobility and fraught domesticity: Zoom fails and interruption videos in the Covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

ABSTRACT Protracted pandemic shut-downs, which began in Spring 2020, rapidly relocated workplaces to domestic spaces. This article explores how “home” as a distinctly gendered space has been recalibrated in the pandemic to accommodate a range of new uses. Detailing the ever-increasing scrutiny of and technological intrusion into the home/private space, we examine the now curtailed mobility of professional class workers and the conspicuous gendering of new work-at-home arrangements made visible in “Zoom fails” and viral videos of interrupted experts. Analysis of these “interruption” videos catalogues the ways male authority is destabilized through domestic chaos and technological failure. Temporal frameworks are employed to explore dominant aesthetics and affective qualities of viral interruption videos highlighting how children tend to provoke anxiety, manifest to different degrees and in differently gendered registers depending on whether an interview subject is male or female. By comparison, pets appear to carry no such connotations and seem to be a uniformly welcomed presence. Conceiving of the interruption as an ambivalent temporal event, we argue that these videos stage the collision of professional and domestic identities in a way that presses on the charged thematics of time-keeping and care-giving.