Chronopolitics of Pioneer Journalists: Counter-Surveillance of Economic COVID-19 Measures on Digital Platforms.

Eisewicht, Paul; Grenz, Tilo; Steinmann, Nico Maximilian

Abstract

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many companies were forced to respond to changing conditions in terms of economic pressure, hygienic protection measures and moral obligations to customers and employees. Social media proved to be a form of consumer monitoring of the behaviour of business organizations, on the one hand documenting the economic consequences of the pandemic and the reactions of companies and on the other hand taking a critical stance, promoting organized resistance and sanctioning misconduct. Companies manoeuvred themselves into an arena of mediated visibility. Using the case of paid sick leave at Kroger, this contribution follows the shift from asymmetrical to increasingly reciprocal and counter-directed forms of surveillance. This article focuses on the temporality of this dispersed consumer knowledge cultures. Contrary to collective or homogenizing perspectives on these protest cultures, the article focuses on the dynamic difference between the individual and the collective, here exemplified by the specific case of a pioneer journalist. Thus, collective action over time is based on the temporal localisation of media activities in time, a knowledge- cultural practice that is introduced in the article as “temporal fixation” (as a chronopolitical practice by pioneer journalists). To capture these knowledge-cultural dynamics, the article develops a novel process-orientated approach that combines eventful sociology and the arena approach.