Uniqueness of circumstance isn’t always the best environment for scientific research. As Eszter Hargittai suggests in the introduction to ‘Connected in Isolation: Digital Privilege in Unsettled Times’ (The MIT Press, £22, ISBN 9780262047371), events that have journalists scrambling to deploy that much-overused epithet ‘unprecedented’ inevitably tend to produce ‘unreproducible’ observations, which is something scientists like to avoid where possible.
And yet, there are events such as the Covid lockdowns (9/11 is another) in which “capturing the uniqueness of the moment is itself an important contribution”, not least because times were – especially at the beginning of the pandemic – ‘unusual’.
With ‘Connected in Isolation’ the author’s goals are threefold. First is to “document people’s digital media experiences during lockdown, especially as these pertain to communicating and learning about the pandemic.” Second is to show how these experiences “varied...