“Ha! Suck on that Corona, I Found Something to Do”

Abstract

In the spring of 2020 young people were living in an exceptional period of isolation, messiness and emotional turmoil. The pandemic situation in Finland serves as the background of this study, which focuses on participation and the voice of adolescents in times of crisis. My inquiry is based on 75 diaries collected by diverse museums and archives and originally created by 11- to 18-year-olds during remote schooling, and my aim is to ascertain how they were invited in and responded to making the stuff of history. Combining oral history and media ethnographic methods, I provide an analysis of the diaries focusing on the emotional resilience attached to hobbies, the echo that the narrators’ information habits generate, and the media ecologies that resulted from the crafting and writing of diaries. My main argument is that although the diaries capture the narrators’ reactions to the crisis, the strong presence of their ordinary lives exposes shared generational traits that are worth preserving beyond this strange time. The students were writing in and about the immediate environment in which they lived their lives, which resulted in an uncommon and rich form of oral history that raised new questions about young people’s experiences during and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.