The Evolution of Pandemic Discussion

Back in 2020, widespread lockdowns pushed people to immerse themselves in new activities: nurturing sourdough starters, chipping away at puzzles, hosting virtual watch parties and hangouts. Timothy Recuber, associate professor of sociology and chair of Smith College’s sociology department, spent much of his epidemic time finishing his book The Digital Departed: How We Face Death, Commemorate Life, and Chase Virtual Immortality. In finishing that book, he got the idea for his next one.

“[For The Digital Departed], I ended up writing quite a bit about how people were streaming the dying moments of their loved ones and how COVID victims were posting their final words to Facebook and other online platforms,” Recuber says. “As the pandemic wore on, I became fascinated by how people’s attitudes toward it were changing. I wanted to learn more about exactly how and why those attitudes towards COVID risk and mitigation were shifting.”

That fascination became the beginnings of his forthcoming book, Getting Over COVID. With the help of several students, Recuber has been compiling examples of media coverage to see when and how the pandemic was being discussed, and how those discussions evolved over time. While Recuber is planning on doing more research, writing, and revisions, he shared some insight into the team’s work and how it’s evolved, as well as how he navigates the darker sides of his research topics.

What kind of media are you and your students examining for Getting Over COVID?
“Choosing what kind of media to focus on for a project like this always involves some kind of balancing act between what you want to know, what is available to search and to study, and what can be manageably analyzed by a small team of researchers who—in my work anyway—are doing most of the analysis by hand, so to speak. That means reading things and categorizing them on our own, rather than using any kind of computational approaches. 

“With those criteria in mind, we’ve looked at mainstream news reporting—focusing on The New York Times, The Washington Post, and USA Today. We’ve analyzed government communications, in the form of an archive of all the CDC’s posters about COVID throughout the course of the pandemic. And we’ve also been analyzing transcripts of The Joe Rogan Experience, since it is the most listened to podcast in the country, if not the world, and since Joe Rogan sometimes served as a vessel to launder right-wing or alternative views about the pandemic, as well as conspiracy theories about COVID. There’s more in the works, but that’s what we’ve been using so far.”

You described the early part of the pandemic as a “blow to American individualism.” Can you expand on that?
“In the early parts of the pandemic we were all asked to sacrifice, to varying degrees, for the well-being of others. We stayed home and ‘locked down’ not just for our families and friends but for people we had never met, people who were vulnerable somewhere far away from us. That kind of collective responsibility and care for others is somewhat at odds with the notions of individualism with which most of us are raised in this country. The idea that we are only responsible for ourselves and that our successes or failures are due to our own hard work and talent, or lack thereof, is really contradicted by a virus that infects people indiscriminately and that can be mild or asymptomatic for one person and deadly for another. But I think that’s one of the reasons that people pretty quickly soured on so-called ‘lockdowns’ and mask mandates and things like that—individualism is a pretty cherished value in this country and this sudden, global effort to think differently about our collective responsibility to one another didn’t have time or long-term institutional commitment to fully take root.”

Much of your research involves human responses to catastrophes, death, and other traumas. How do you ensure that the heaviness of your work doesn’t weigh you down personally?
“It can be difficult at times, but I have a nice life outside of the difficult subjects I research, so I’m lucky to be able to turn to my family and friends and enjoy myself when the work gets too heavy. You have to compartmentalize like that when you do this kind of work, for sure, but I also feel that sometimes thinking about death, mortality, and misfortune can be kind of helpful for one’s own mental well-being. For example, when I spent a long time researching The Digital Departed by reading blogs of terminally ill people, it really did help me appreciate my own life more and not take everyday things for granted. It sounds a little cliché, and it certainly wasn’t the point of doing the research, but being immersed in the writing of people who would have given anything to have just one more of the kind of normal, pain-free days with my family that many people take for granted, that really gave me a new perspective.”

You did a lecture back in October 2025 also called Getting Over COVID. How has that lecture influenced your forthcoming book?
“The book has already evolved quite a bit since I gave that talk, and really, that’s what has to happen as you gather new data, and read more scholarly theories to help you interpret that data. That first talk was my own way of thinking through what a sociological theory would look like that explained how societies got over problems they once experienced as dangerous or pressing. The data that my team and I have looked at since then has gotten me thinking about the ideologies that underpin this social process of getting over [COVID], and obviously individualism is a big one. But we have a good deal more data to gather and analyze and more scholarship to engage with, so the project is likely to continue evolving as we go.”