Video-mediated situations as a basis for new societal spaces during and after the COVID- 19 crisis

This paper focuses on a major challenge that the COVID-19 pandemic poses to societies worldwide, namely the restriction of social contacts in order to limit the spread of the coronavirus. The need to physically distance has enormous implications for private, professional and public spaces and situations. When Peter Wagner (2020) pursues the question of why the COVID-19 pandemic is ascribed a society-changing potential, he refers to this movement restrictions. In fact, the sudden and radical suspension of most economic, social and cultural activities (Ammar et al., 2020) during the pandemic has changed the possibilities of participating in social space (Levebre, 1974) radically. While measures against the virus have swept the public space and face-to-face interactions have become a health risk, we hypothesise that much of social life has shifted to video-mediated interactions (Beaunoyer et al., 2020; Gilbert et al., 2020). To maintain sociality, we have observed that, in many cases, interactions have shifted to video-based communication channels and led to new and unexpected spaces.