Word from the Guest Editors The role of resilience and digital technologies in the emergence of new normal

The launch of this special issue coincided with a pivotal period in history, when the vast majority of countries and populations worldwide were navigating the uncertain path out of the confinement imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. This was not the first attempt at decontamination, nor was it sure that we would finally be able to return to the normal functioning of our economy and society in general. The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an unprecedented disruption of economic and social activities. Offices closed, universities and schools without students or teachers, and businesses deemed non-vital were forced to close. The pandemic has brought us face to face with the first peril we face - death - and forced us to live with it daily, while the capitalist society we have adopted has tried by every means possible - frenetic consumerism, the race for performance and the all-out commodification of human activities - to sublimate the feeling of finitude. As a result, our relationship with ourselves and with others has been turned upside down. The other has become a source of contagion and therefore of danger, and distance, in societies that had learned to break it down and tame it, has now become a rule of survival. This distance is consented to and inflicted on oneself out of love for one’s kind and the perception of danger that each person embodies. Distrust and mistrust were the watchwords of human life confined under the pandemic. Less surprisingly, at least for keen observers of society and human interaction, the decision to confine human beings to enclosed spaces brought to light the paradoxes and inconsistencies of the capitalist mode of production that we have raised as a totem. There are glaring inequalities between rich and poor, between young and old, between large companies lavished with subsidies and public money to the point of bulimia, and small and very small companies swept away by the cyclone of cascading bankruptcies and the shutdown of their production tools, and inequalities between countries in their access to vaccines, etc. As in times of war, certain professions and social categories, once invisible and unthought of, were quickly placed on the front line as an offering on the altar of the great upheaval. Realizing that specific vital sectors were being deprived, the appetite for tinkering was never so whetted, calling into question the supposed rationality and perceptiveness of the choices made by political leaders. Hesitations, prevarications, contested choices, and accusations of collusion with pharmaceutical laboratories - the public authorities had their work cut out for them during the pandemic. Taking advantage of this moment of severe and impromptu disruption, the State nonetheless regained a semblance of its omnipotent power of legitimate violence by forcing us to shut ourselves away in closed spaces and depriving us of the fundamental right of freedom of movement. Despite reminders of the fundamental values and principles that comprise the myths of modern Western society, which has established individual freedom as an inalienable right (Friedland & Alford, 1991), submission to confinement has been massive. Whether this was a case of renunciation or a full-scale test of the resilience of the values that underpin modern Western society is a question worth asking. However, the COVID-19 pandemic also provided fertile ground for experimenting with new ways of working, consuming, coordinating, and interacting, as well as reimagining spaces and boundaries between humans and non-humans. A dramatic episode for most, with its heavy toll of social and psychological consequences, but also an extraordinary parenthesis for rethinking the normal and experimenting with a new normality. It is from this angle of normality …