Cascading Crises: Society in the Age of COVID-19.

The tsunami of change triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed society in a series of cascading crises. Unlike disasters that are more temporarily and spatially bounded, the pandemic has continued to expand across time and space for over a year, leaving an unusually broad range of second-order and third-order harms in its wake. Globally, the unusual conditions of the pandemic-unlike other crises-have impacted almost every facet of our lives. The pandemic has deepened existing inequalities and created new vulnerabilities related to social isolation, incarceration, involuntary exclusion from the labor market, diminished economic opportunity, life-and-death risk in the workplace, and a host of emergent digital, emotional, and economic divides. In tandem, many less advantaged individuals and groups have suffered disproportionate hardship related to the pandemic in the form of fear and anxiety, exposure to misinformation, and the effects of the politicization of the crisis. Many of these phenomena will have a long tail that we are only beginning to understand. Nonetheless, the research also offers evidence of resilience on several fronts including nimble organizational response, emergent communication practices, spontaneous solidarity, and the power of hope. While we do not know what the post COVID-19 world will look like, the scholarship here tells us that the virus has not exhausted society's adaptive potential.

A quantitative examination of explanations for reasons for internet nonuse.

This article investigates patterns of reasons for digital disengagement of British adults. It adds a psychological dimension to research that is mostly sociological in nature in trying to separate out explanations for disengaging from the Internet by choice or by forced exclusion. The analysis of a nationally representative survey shows differences between the number of reasons and the most important reasons among different sociodemographic groups, but also among individuals with different psychological profiles. The findings suggest that ex- and nonusers do not have one simple reason for nonuse, but a multifaceted range of reasons, which often represent disadvantages at several levels. The range of often mentioned reasons, moreover, shows that motivations for disengagement cannot be measured by means of the most important reason, but that all reasons have to be taken into account and looked at concertedly.