The Uneven Costs of Connection: Mapping Deep Mediatization Under COVID-19

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic caused what we might think of as a “natural experiment in deep mediatization” as people were more or less forced to alter their lives from one day to the other. This report presents the results from a representative Swedish survey conducted in 2021 that mapped how the COVID-19 pandemic affected people’s usage of media and digital tools. The analysis deploys factor analysis to construct five types of mediatization that took place during the pandemic and then investigates the impact of demographic factors on each type. The study shows that the costs of connection played out differently in different segments of the Swedish population. Notably, while young women were affected in a more negative way than others by digital entanglement, older people with low education suffered from a sense of alienation vis-à-vis new technology. While these types of costs represent two different forms of fractured autonomy, the analysis also shows that younger men with higher education to a greater extent maintained a sense of “elective connectivity” during the COVID-19 pandemic.