Young adults’ perceptions of entertainment consumption in their everyday lives during the COVID-19 pandemic: Negotiating versatility, emotions, and agency in times of limited choice

In this paper, we analyze and link (limited) versatility, emotionality, and agency in young adults’ pandemic entertainment consumption patterns. Pre-pandemic studies based their conceptualizations on an abundance context, where limited-time perceptions led to versatile and ideologically informed consumption decisions linked to overwhelmingly positive emotions, emphasizing free choice and convenience. However, the COVID-19 pandemic and its restrictions provide a deep context of limited choice and unlimited-time perceptions, an unusual situation described by Christian Fuchs as the radicalization of time, space, and sociality. In this context, entertainment consumption played a central role in ordering complex realities, making sense of self and society, regaining control, and exercising agency in young adults’ everyday lives. Based on 86 self-reflective accounts, we argue that pandemic consumption versatility is not a given and suggest a complexified idea of entertainment consumption as versatile. Young adults often accept and indulge in rigid habitual patterns, emphasizing negative emotions to create coherence during confusing and pessimistic times, while others see versatility as embracing the inconvenient if it is safe to do so and allowed, as they link versatility to regaining control over their everyday lives and making sense of what, for others, feels like a waste of time.