If it had been you who traveled back in time, through the portal of those testimonials, while sitting at your desk, eating lunch, folding laundry, driving, squinting at your laptop in the sun beside a swimming pool while the other parents gossiped and laughed loudly and asked you why you weren’t joining in.
#Does iconomy effect town chat archive
They are themes you would have noticed surfacing in even the earliest interviews in the archive if it had been you, instead of me, who spent a chunk of last summer and fall reading transcripts and listening to hours and hours of recordings. These aren’t just characteristics of the current mood. A lack of interest - or maybe just some kind of block - when it comes to looking back. (They would say, “ ‘Wow, just even getting this email from you is bringing so many feelings back,’” one of the interviewers explained.) Many just ghosted the project altogether. When it came time to conduct the final round of interviews last summer, dozens of people declined. Even many of the project’s participants told the interviewers, at different points, that they had no desire to look at the transcripts from their previous interviews, and some who did read through them reported feeling shaken, as though they’d been plunged back into a bad dream.
But it’s also material that, as noted, most people seem to feel great resistance to revisiting.
The archive contains a stupefying amount of lived experience, material that the Columbia sociologists who initiated the project, Ryan Hagen and Denise Milstein, could theoretically spend the rest of their academic careers examining. Those working in hospitals report feeling menaced by constant auditory stimulation - the beeps, the alarms, the calls for respiratory therapists, Stat! - while outside the hospitals, well-meaning New Yorkers mark time by leaning out their windows, screaming and banging pots. Another father of two, still adrift in the doldrums of the pandemic nine months later, hears his 11-year-old daughter cry out, “I want homework!” and realizes how desperate for structure she has become. A father of two, in the Spuyten Duyvil neighborhood of the Bronx, predicts, in April 2020, a permanent end to the custom of shaking hands (“It just seems like a really stupid thing to do - and unnecessary”) and suspects everything will start going back to normal by the end of May. The archive, which will eventually be made public by Columbia, bulges with revelations, anecdotes, anxieties, blind spots, big ideas and weird ideas. The anguish of the pandemic heightened and dulled. During that time, unintelligible experiences became more intelligible or remained defiantly unintelligible.
The researchers talked to those same people again many months later, and again after that, conducting three waves of interviews about pandemic life from the spring of 2020 to the fall of 2022. People spoke to the interviewers for hours about what they were seeing, doing and feeling and about what they expected, or feared, might happen next. Within weeks of the first confirmed Covid case surfacing in New York City, an impromptu collective of sociologists and oral historians assembled virtually and began interviewing, over Zoom, roughly 200 New Yorkers to document their individual experiences of the pandemic as it unfolded. One excellent place to start rummaging, if you’re still with me: The NYC Covid-19 Oral History, Narrative and Memory Archive, established at Columbia University in March 2020. And so, with many people claiming (publicly, at least) that they’re over the pandemic - that they have, so to speak, restraightened all their picture frames and dragged their psychic trash to the curb - this article is saying: Hey, hold up. As we enter a fourth pandemic year, each of us is consciously or subconsciously working through potentially irreconcilable stories about what we lived through - or else, strenuously avoiding that dissonance, insisting there’s no work to be done. They raise the possibility that when we say the pandemic is over, we are actually seeking permission to act like it never happened - to let ourselves off the hook from having to make sense of it or take seriously its continuing effects. They’re about the necessity of looking back at the pandemic with intelligence and care, while acknowledging that the pandemic is still with us. Notice your resistance to reading the next several thousand words.
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