From “Far Away” to “Shock” to “Fatigue” to “Back to Normal”: How Young People Experienced News During the First Wave of the COVID-19 Pandemic

This paper explores how young people used and experienced news during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing from 22 in-depth interviews with Dutch young people (19-36), we found four successive phases in which participants used and made sense of news in distinct ways. First, before the virus reached the Netherlands, they saw it as “a problem far away” and felt indifferent toward the news. During the second phase of “shock”, as COVID-19 reached the Netherlands, news use increased as participants frantically tried to make sense of the situation. Third, participants experienced “Corona-fatigue” due to informational and emotional overload and began “dosing” their intake of news. Finally, they became used to “the new normal” and returned to (perceived) regular levels of news consumption. Two new rituals stood out during the first wave: press conferences seemingly “interpellated” participants as Dutch citizens who should take their responsibility, and daily updates of COVID-19 cases were used as a gauge for how “we” were doing. Overall, participants’ position could best be described as critical-but-pragmatic: even if they questioned the veracity of some news, they chose to follow measures to curtail the virus