On Social Distancing
The current COVID-19 pandemic has put everyone to the test on multiple dimensions. It can confidently be said that this situation will represent a watershed in many respects, from global economy to social life. Here, I’d like to take a look at the changes concerning social this crisis has brought, emphasizing on social distancing measures.
As a means to contain the spread of the new virus, governments across the world have established a series of restrictions and limitations on social gatherings, often requiring the population to refrain from socialization altogether by imposing lockdowns. On top of this, the fear of infection itself makes people less willing to meet with others.
Humans, being social animals (that some call gregarious), do not cope well with such limitations to socialization. It has already been shown that lockdown has caused an increase in domestic violence and an overall negative impact on mental health worldwide. Other distancing measures, such as the ban of mass events, working from home and simply keeping our distance from others, threaten to affect communities by reinforcing individualism, fracturing social bonds, and increasing anxiety.
It is yet to be seen how all these changes to social life will impact society in the long run. For the time being, I would like to discuss a few elements that I consider relevant to this issue.
First, isolation threatens to make social relations even more fragile (or liquid if we borrow Bauman’s term). In a culture characterized by a constant search for individual pleasure and fluidity (termed the hypermodern era by Lipovetsky), where freedom to choose is a central value — freedom to consume, freedom to appear, and freedom to be — , we now find ourselves presented with the opportunity to — finally — have total freedom over who to keep in touch with. Dull encounters, such as the eventual small talk at the elevator, or the scripted exchange or requests that characterize interactions at shops can now be avoided. Indeed, it is amusing to me how, during all this time, being thousand of kilometers apart from my family has not been an obstacle for keeping up with their lives. On the other hand, I ignore what people across the street are doing. For many months, I only knew of the pandemic itself through the news and from the ambulance siren sounds.
Thus, just like the decline of the mall did not entail the end of consumerism, but it was simply replaced by a more individualistic mode of consumption — namely online shopping (again, a symptom of hypermodernity, where consumption is not mainly done for social motives but is done for selfish pleasure), the temporary restriction of social interaction does not mean the end of it, but in our time it could be taken as an invitation to make interactions even more self-centered. Nonetheless, it has been observed that lockdown measures have had the opposite effect. Many governments have seen their popularities get a boost in what is called a Rally ‘ round the flag effect. It has been suggested, however, that people rallied around institutions and not governments themselves. In any case, the sense of community was reinforced. A question that arises from this, however, is how long does this effect last? Example: In the first months of the pandemic, media around the world told the story of Italian flags hanging from balconies and people singing to show unity amid the crisis. As of now, however, the Italian government is at the brink of a(nother) political crisis, and discontent has grown among the population over the restrictions imposed in the second lockdown. Let’s also not forget those images of people selfishly hoarding toilet paper at the beginning of the crisis. In many instances, like war, this situation has brought up the worst side of people.
Going back to intra-personal issues, being limited to mostly virtual interactions has also made me reflect on interaction as a structure. Remote meetings (either one-to-one or conferences), unlike in-person encounters, offer little more than the most elementary components needed for communication: speaker(s), listener(s), a medium, a shared code, the eventual noise, etc. Body language cues, essential in “traditional” communication, are, for the most part, now unavailable. I’ve even got to the point where I think that, from a phenomenological point of view, these situations do not differ greatly from the interaction offered by artificially intelligent agents (such as chatbots). Being already acquainted with our interlocutors brings a little bit more substance to these encounters; on the contrary, meeting with people exclusively through virtual means does not compare does not seem to create the same rapport as through face-to-face interaction. In fact, a friend once confessed to me how strange it felt to meet someone for the first time after having spent hours talking to them online.
If we consider that millions of students around the world have been taking lessons remotely — in an age when interacting is crucial for personal development and acquiring social skills — it is inevitable to ask ourselves what the repercussions of the current situation in those generations will be. Of course, this situation will be most likely over within a few years, but the impact social dynamics will last longer. Games, jokes, memes, social references will potentially be very different from those of other generations.
Finally, it is important to be aware of the fact that different narratives around the pandemic are being constructed. While — as always — the most extended narrative is the one told by developed (mostly) Western nations, where social distancing and strict lockdowns have been a thing, there is a part of the world that has lived the last months in a completely different way. Only those with sufficient economic means — which comprises most of the people living in developed nations and the upper classes in developing nations — have been able to comply with the movement restrictions. In the Third World, complying with social distance and lockdown measures is simply not an option for many. Some governments, aware of this fact, have refrained from enforcing these rules strictly. Socioeconomic class, thus, puts a divide that could threaten to make the world even more unequal beyond economic terms. We can speculate that those in the “privileged” group will certainly tell a different story about the pandemic from those who had to keep going out to make ends meet, perhaps in a similar fashion to the diverging narratives that develop in the context of war depending on whether one directly experienced the conflict or not.
Thus, a new social reality seems to be in the making.
