digisoc 3: Post-COVID-19 digital world: what will be the new normal?
We are currently living through a monumental epidemic that will forever change our society as we know it. Some of the biggest social implications are the alienation of people from their normal daily activities, and the general willingness to forfeit safety over privacy or freedom. If this epidemic happened a decade sooner, it would have been profoundly different. Our response is heavily shaped by our access to the Internet and to the services that connect us across quarantine-enforced distances.
If COVID-19 struck ten or twenty years ago, we wouldn’t have had the infrastructure prepared to move our lives online. We would have struggled with getting the news, dealing with social alienation, and keeping ourselves sane. SciFi genres at the time depicted the future of technology bringing people together in-person, which is far from the way that modern social media replaces instead of augments in-person interaction. If you described a slice of March 2020 to someone from a generation ago, they would call this an apocalypse on account of social isolation just as much as any other reason. Imagine not seeing anyone but your own family for months.
Nowadays, as more and more aspects of our daily lives move to digital media, our culture is rapidly reforming to accommodate it. Our social, educational, and religious needs have moved to services like Zoom. Parents encourage their kids to meet and date online strangers (although this is much more prevalent in the Jewish community). As a practicing religious Jew myself, I’ve been going to Zoom minyanim (prayer services) in lieu of synagogue to stay connected. Campuses are closed, but school persists online. Gyms have shut down, but YouTube workouts are surging. There is a digital alternative for almost everything we are missing out on. Forced by circumstances, we are fully submerging ourselves into an all-online lifestyle.
“This too shall pass” is the unofficial motto of 2020. God willing, one day we will be free from this virus. It isn’t clear what life will look like after then. What will happen to social interaction after the quarantine is lifted? Will we return to the status quo, see it as a call to action to go outside more, or will we further recede into the digital world? I see it going one of two ways: rejection of digital media and an aggressive return to in-person interaction, or complacency with the inertia of our online lifestyle.
Rejection:
The 1920’s in the United States was a period of rampant partying, huge economic growth, and optimism. They were the golden years. The more wishful of us had hoped that the 2020’s would be a similar decade of high quality of life, following the remarkable upward market trends we’ve seen these past few years. It would be an understatement to say they were disappointed by these first few months of it.
After a year of being cooped-up indoors, we might embrace our freedom with newfound ardor. Digital media wouldn’t be thrown out the window entirely, but our time under lock-down would bring to light how much missed life without our screens. As some so aptly put it, life is on hold so we can pack two Summers into 2021.
Concert attendance would be at an all-time high. Parks would be full, beaches would be packed, people would connect like never before. That’s not to say people won’t be taking Instagram-filtered photos for the “likes,” but that wouldn’t be the driving reason for why they went outside. It’s idealistic, but a renewed enthusiasm for life is a common response to meeting face-to-face with death. Having been shown our mortality and the fragility of our normal lifestyle, it would be a natural reaction.
If this is the kind of bounce-back that happens, then we might get to see another decade of Roaring Twenties. It’s certainly what I’m hoping for. A much more realistic outcome, however, is that social distancing leaves a permanent mark on us. We would recede deeper into our digital lives.
Complacency:
After I flew back to Maryland from Manchester when my semester abroad was interrupted by COVID-19, I didn’t leave the house for two weeks. That was almost two months ago. Now, I can go weeks without leaving my apartment or seeing new faces. Quarantine is the new normal. New habits become old habits, and old habits die hard.
Tech giants have been releasing a myriad of new chat-room services to meet the demand of a world trying to reconnect with their loved ones, coworkers, professors, and close friends. It’s very common to have online friends these days. In fact, it’s not so unreasonable to be far closer with your online friends than with anyone else. Millions of relationships and friendships have been forced to be long-distance, and many are learning to cope. These apps aren’t going anywhere after the quarantine is lifted. Zoom parties could be a staple of 2020 entertainment. Holidays, religious activities, family dinners, and parties have moved to Zoom-like apps for the time being. Clearly some of these activities will return to our offline lives after the quarantine is lifted, but it’s entirely reasonable that some stick around online.
While I’m sure most students can’t wait to get back onto campus, some have been turned onto the option of virtual college. Online university is not a new development. The first fully online university was founding as early as 1989. With COVID-19 forcing all in-person learning online, virtual learning is now almost compulsory for students. As more funding gets pumped into educational services like Zoom and Google Classroom, and as more teachers and students get accustomed to using them, online university might become a much more common alternative to traditional brick-and-mortar campuses.
Many companies are also reevaluating the need for physical company campuses, after having seen how effectively people work from home. As Larry Pearlman from Marsh Risk Consulting put it, “Technology has enabled many businesses to function as normal during the pandemic. We can expect that the remote working option will grow in popularity, meaning some of the workforce will make working from home permanent.”
The ethical argument about how much privacy and freedom should be forfeit for the sake of public safety is one of the most hotly debated today. Countries that already run surveillance states like China have a significant advantage in dealing with COVID-19, especially when it comes to contact tracing. While contact-tracing apps aren’t the huge breach in privacy they were initially made out to be, they would have just as much outstanding support regardless. People all around the world are willing to submit their data to government organizations more than ever before. This is a hard precedent to stop. After 9/11, airport security has never been the same, and I doubt it ever will. We may very well never see the same support for privacy on the internet ever again.
Only time will tell how COVID-19 will affect our future. Of the many paths it can take us, all of them are closely linked to the digital aspects of our society and how we will live our lives at a safe distance from one another. Precedents will be set and broken. Our daily lives might become far more digital than we had ever expected.
When I first applied to the University of Manchester for a semester exchange program, Digital Society: Living in a Networked World was a backup class in case I couldn’t get into all of my first choices. I wasn’t too hesitant to sign up for it, because the topic sounded relevant and interesting, but I didn’t really have an idea of what I was getting into. Now, after finishing it, I found this to be a profoundly interesting and meaningful class to take. Thank you so much for offering it!
Digital Engagement was by far my favorite topic we covered. It made me think about the websites and services I use from a very different perspective. Now, I’m much more able to pick up on when brands like Wendy’s using their twitter personas as a marketing tool. Brands hiding behind entertaining outward appearances show up everywhere! I had had a rough gist that, whenever a website or app is free, that I am the product, but critically analyzing it through the lenses of surveillance capitalism was incredibly eye-opening to me. I was challenged to change my perspectives and express them in blog-post formats I had never done before. It was hard, but I’m grateful for it.
I study mechanical engineering, applied mathematics, and cyber security. Those are all fields where people all too often ask “how” questions, not “why” questions. This class made me ask “why.” I greatly appreciate that. We can’t just build and surround ourselves with technology without critically analyzing their greater implications. The underlying structure of the internet shapes the services we use, and therefore the experiences we have while browsing the web. As someone who will contribute to this underlying structure one day, largely in the form of future Internet of Things (IoT) standards for physical hazard mitigation, I feel more conscious of how my decisions may have butterfly-effects on the future of human-computer interaction. The standards we set on how security and data is to be handled have very important implications about the challenges we will face, and I’m glad to have gained the critical thinking skills to see them.
Someone decided way back when that if you forgot your password, simply knowing your mother’s maiden name or the name of your first pet is sufficient authentication. Because of that, we are now (quite comedically, if I might add) protective of that information. Some people I know even use imaginary family members or nonexistent home addresses to thwart malicious hackers. That one person’s choice about authentication had such a huge impact on how we live our daily digital lives. We currently live in an incredibly tumultuous time, with the rising threats of social media propaganda, quantum computing, and big-data machine learning looming over us. I can only begin to imagine what sorts of precedents will be set in the coming years.
This class taught me that I need to be conscious of what I say, read, and trust on the internet, because that is my responsibility as a citizen of the internet. I need to be vigilant about the changing tides of technology, and how they will affect my life. Again, thank you for making this semester an enlightening experience.
