By Hattie Turner
Will the post Covid-19 era mean we finally put our phones down?
Aristotle described man as being ‘by nature a social animal’. I’d like to think if Aristotle was around today, he’d have meant this in the non-virtual sense. This year has really pushed our lives online, more so than ever before. In April, worldwide usage of Zoom was at 300 million daily active users, compared with 10 million in December 2019. In the UK this year, Ofcom found that of the total time spent on the internet, four fifths was on a mobile phone.
Our obsession with phones is nothing new. Since the first mobile phone was invented in 1973 by Dr Martin Cooper, usage in the UK has risen to 95% by 2019. I’m pleased to have been one of the last generations to grow up without phones being central to our lives. At the age of 15, I had a Nokia 3310 ‘to be used only in emergencies.’ It didn’t really do much, so it largely remained at the bottom of my school bag while we gossiped on the bus and scribbled down last-minute homework. At 29, a slightly old-fashioned part of me wishes it had stayed like that.
Fast forward to 2020 and, for many of us, the days may have felt like they blurred into each other. You found yourself floating through the seasons, like Hugh Grant in that scene from Notting Hill. The only way of clinging onto a sense of normality was through your phone. It was the gateway to family, friends, and the wider world. It was where you read articles on how to knit and make cocktails, and where you joined in on virtual fitness classes. It became the primary way of accessing a version of the life you had before Covid.
We have been largely deprived, rightly or wrongly, of real social contact for the past year. The kind of social contact I imagine Aristotle was convinced of as being so essential to society. Think forward to when the full weight of the restrictions will be gone from our lives. Simply seeing other people, without the ever-present grey cloud of social distancing and awkward elbow bumps, will feel like breathing again after being underwater for far too long. Picture yourself meeting up with friends in the pub for the first time after life has returned to normal. Their faces bear little resemblance to the digital versions you’ve been largely interacting with previously. They are expressive, imperfect and real. Will you be wasting that time scrolling through Twitter? I hope a few of us will now think twice.
I think we could well be set for a renaissance in terms of social interaction. We have all had that feeling of taking a picture of a beautiful building or landscape, yet the image never quite matches the reality. The experience of virtual socialising is very much the same. It is an imprint of the real thing and will never compete with the original ‘social network’.
Hattie Turner