A Digital Native in the COVID-19 Lockdown

This blog, published 3 May, 2020, is written by Xenia Rochelle Jones, a Doctoral Research Student at The Open University. Xenia's work explores transnational migration with a focus on the study of cultural hybridity and third spaces.

Noortje Marres writes in Digital Sociology, that digital data offers us a window into the social world, that the 'digital touches on most dimensions of social life, from the most intimate details to the widest global systems...a total social fact.' These windows though are dependent upon, and integrated into platforms, technical infrastructures that while allowing for interactivity; also dictate the kind of exchange for creators of content or consumers of content. When the UK lockdown for COVID-19 was announced on the 23^rd of March 2020 by PM Boris Johnson, the limitations on social movement and behaviour in the country as a response to mitigate the spread of the pandemic meant that majority of the populace, except for the very few frontline workers, will have to isolate at home. While there is allowed movement – once a day exercise, ability to go out to buy necessities – public gatherings are a no-no and when out, social distancing must be practiced. If work must be done, it must be done so at home and as for travel, only essential travel is allowed. Pretty soon, much of the UK’s cities and towns have appeared empty as numbers of infected cases, deaths and recoveries climbed the scale. So far in the country (as of 28 April, 2020) there have been 157,149 coronavirus recorded cases with around 21,092 deaths and climbing. While it is argued that the infection rate has peaked, the government are yet to announce an end to the lockdown with ‘The Great Lockdown’ expected to be the worst economic downturn to hit the world since ‘The great depression’ of the 1920’s.

Living a digital-loaded life

Locked and isolated in our homes, we watch these events through ‘digital windows’. Since 2018 streaming services have overtaken pay TV in the UK. Netflix, Amazon Prime and NOW TV have become the source of entertainment in the country; with viewing and information sourcing online being defacto especially between those aged 16-34. This is true in the case of my husband and myself as our lives can be described as hyper-connected, being fully immersed in what is deemed ‘the digital age’. For my PhD studies, I connect with my supervisors through Skype, access the digital libraries via the Open University’s online library from where I can also access related libraries and archives. To participate in the Open University’s PhD Teaching Scheme, I connect with the module team through emails, the Open University’s Virtual Learning Environment and related systems like Adobe Connect. I can do this through my laptops or my Smartphones which I have 2 of – one for work and for my studies, the other (and this is a confession) to access things that I like and to do personal tasks. The latter Smartphone, an Samsung J6, is loaded with Netflix, Amazon Prime & Crunchyroll Apps as well as Google Apps like Youtube, Chrome, Google Docs, Google Maps and Calendar. In it, I have also installed my Tesco and Asda Apps to allow me to do grocery shopping online faster, easier. My banking apps are also loaded in it as well as the email apps that allow me to access my Gmail and my Open University email.  I also have Skype and WhatsApp installed, the latter of which is my main ‘window’ to the social world I consider essential to me – through it I connect with family and friends. With so much of my digital life ‘loaded’ upon my SJ6, it is safe to say that I cannot do without it, more so in the current lockdown life we are living.

Entertainment consumption and news-scrolling on Chrome aside, my SJ6 is of great importance to me in that it allows me to socially connect and to do important tasks within the limitations of the lockdown. Isolation is a fact during the lockdown. Clifford Singer reminds us that human beings are social animals and that “our biological, psychological, and social systems evolved to thrive in collaborative networks of people.” According to the work of Marc Prensky, I am a digital native, having grown up around computers, video games and the internet. Eversince I can remember, I have always been socially connected online – on IRC in my teen years, adapting to new technologies as they developed, moving on from text messaging to social media platforms that allowed for interactivity – creating of content and consuming content to be shared with either a select group of people or for all the world to access, online. Having lived, grown up and worked in different countries, to be online to me means to be connected to people – my family in the Philippines, the US, parts of Europe, Southeast Asia and the Middle East and friends I have made all over the world, some whom I have made connections with ‘in real life’, and some having connected to but have made bonds with through shared interests and being connected with for years, virtually. When the pandemic happened, I knew of it first from virtual friends in Hongkong last December 2019 who, since then, have put up daily updates about what has happening in China’s Hubei province through their WeChat accounts (China’s largest social media and messaging app with over a billion users).  As the COVID-19 outbreak turned into a pandemic and as the contagious viral disease swept the globe, when the virus became community-based and the lockdown happened, I came to realise that the images of death and empty cities from China would become my own norm. And as the scramble for toilet paper and long-life food items left the grocery store aisles bare, I was confronted with yet another challenge – I have to contest with others for resources without leaving my home!

Enhancing Daily Routine

My routine, on a normal day would be like this – I would get up in the morning, have breakfast, do housework, check in online to do academic work, call family in North Wales or get in touch with the younger ‘digital native’ members of the family via WhatsApp, make lunch, read related literature and do PhD work, go for a walk, make dinner, eat dinner, watch some streaming services (Netflix, Amazon Prime or Crunchyroll) while doing so, wash dishes, read some more and likely get sleepy doing so, then get ready for bed. It’s been 6 months since I stopped working and moved to digital-based work due to our move to Forres in Scotland from Salisbury in England due to my husband’s work with HM Forces as well as to allow myself time to catch up on my PhD work. For 6 months I have re-jigged my life to be digitally-based. So when the lockdown took place, adjustment for me was minimum. My routine now, however, has slightly changed – at breakfast I would check on my Tesco, Asda and Amazon apps for things that I need on stock – flour, rice and yes, toilet paper are still almost always out of stock or when they are, they soon get bought before I can place my order. Before doing anything else I would check on my ICU nurse cousin who works frontline in a hospital in New Jersey in the US and another cousin who works as a nurse at a Veteran’s hospital in California in the US. Almost always, they would be in a state of stress. Our conversations would always turn out to be one in which I would play cheerleader and emotional support. I would then check on my family in North Wales especially since we’ve recently suffered a bereavement. Images and short videos would fly. Occasionally, we’d converse using the video call function of WhatsApp. As I go through my tasks through the day, I am always ‘on-call’ for close friends too, especially those who live alone. From the time the lockdown took place, my SJ6 has never received the volume of video calls, images and memes exchanged as it had done so it this period. Through the platform of WhatsApp, I have become far more connected and available to family and friends, spending more time with them, exerting more effort to support them and understand them, than I have ever done so.  Even during my daily walks and cycles around the place where I live, I would make and take video calls so much so that my everyday is shared, just as my thoughts and positions are. These are of course limited by time and what the SJ6’s camera allows to see, yet I am very much aware that I would like for those at the other end of the video call to understand and feel that for them, I am available.

New Culture? A Hybrid?

The borderline work of culture demands an encounter with ‘newness’...it creates an insurgent act of cultural translation...it renews the past, reconfiguring it as a contingent ‘in-between’ space that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present...becomes a necessity, not nostalgia, of living.

From ‘The Location of Culture’, pp. 10 by H. Bhabha (2004)

If I live in an ‘in-between’ space, that of the lockdown and the pre-lockdown reality, with this space being that which is heavily digital from where I am able to function socially as well as undertake tasks which I can perform by redesigning the way I do things to allow them to be done digitally (studying, connecting with others, banking, doing groceries, consuming information and sharing ideas, creations and thoughts, etc.), then am I a newer translation of a digital native, re-adapted by the self to respond to the limitations of the COVID-19 lockdown? If culture happens all the more so in minoritarian spaces as an act of survival brought on by limitations of resources and spurned on by anxiety, and if there are so many like me struggling to re-jig life to survive, and hopefully thrive in the limitations of the lockdown, are we to see a new iteration of the digital culture? If so, if much of the world has no choice but to turn to the digital, is this new iteration of the digital culture, at least for the duration of the lockdown the new normal? I can say for certain that until I complete my PhD at least, digital working and living would be my normal. How the working world would be impacted post-COVID-19 is something that we have yet to see. However, society would be forced to re-evaluate the way we work to take into context the lessons learned from the pandemic for the purpose of making sure that the risk is managed. Experience changes us, we are who we are and yet we will never be as we were before it happened. I am proposing that as it is right now, I feel that I am a re-jigged digital hybrid and that perhaps COVID-19 will impose similar re-jigging of living digital lives on others so that a situated digital life post COVID-19 will likely result. What that will be remains to be seen.