Researchers from the University of Bristol and the University of Kent identified three distinct ways that Mass Observation writers’ reset the way they imagined their future during a time of great uncertainty.  

As part of a larger collaborative programme that investigated people’s lived experiences of time during the unfolding Covid-19 pandemic in the UK, 'Feeling, making and imagining time: Everyday temporal experiences in the Covid-19 pandemic', this research analysed 228 submissions to Mass Observation and data from ‘feel tanks’, where small groups explore a specific feeling about time, such as stuckness or acceleration. 

In developing the concept of recalibration to understand the ongoing and multiple adjustments of present-future relations, researchers observed from prompts on rhythms and routines, homelife, media and technology and waiting, that futures were recalibrated either by a fissure, a standby or a reset. 

In fissure respondents find it difficult to imagine the future because of the break between the present and future, in standby the present is expanded but there is alertness to the future and in reset futures are modestly and radically recalibrated through imagining life post-pandemic. 

Read the Bristol Digital Futures Institute (BDFI) news item

Paper: Coleman R & Lyon D (2023). Recalibrating Everyday Futures during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Futures Fissured, on Standby and Reset in Mass Observation Responses. Sociology. 

You can watch a recording of Rebecca Coleman’s seminar on the topic via the BDFI’s blog page: https://bdfievents.blogs.bristol.ac.uk/2023/04/19/bdfi-introduces-seminar-series-professor-rebecca-coleman/