Effects of social media usage and SARS-COV-2

‘Social media- A boon or a bane’ is a topic people widely debate on, yielding no conclusions. But this debate permeated to real-life scenarios in the past year and a half. The COVID-19 pandemic led to a worldwide lockdown and ensured that the world came to a standstill. Everyone was shut in either their homes or hostels, PGs- miles away from what they could call home. At uncertain times like these when all sorts of work shifted online, the usage of social media of all forms, very naturally, hit an all-time high. Instagram, WhatsApp, Tiktok were complemented by Zoom, Google Meets and the newer Discord. The usages of all forms of social media spiked up by around 26%.

But how did people really use social media throughout the past year and a half?

Once nation-wide lockdown was imposed, people started to have ample time at their hands while their offices shifted completely to the online modes of operation. So they started connecting with their relatives, friends through various apps like Google Meet, Zoom. Alongside this, the COVID-19 cases kept increasing leading to casualties and news getting more disturbing to watch- by the day. This led to the re-emergence of old classics like Ramayan, Mahabharat to be retelecast for people to feel calmer and safer. People started to find more ways to not feel anxious. Naturally, they turned to social media apps like instagram, tiktok, facebook. What would they do here? Influencers started posting a lot of funny content for more engagement and this led to the staying of users on these platforms. Having some amount of sanity during a gruesome pandemic was initially the only purpose of social media. But, the conditions in the real world were drastically different from what was portrayed on social media. People were dying, migrant workers couldn’t get home, the country was in a haphazard situation, but social media looked as normal as ever with happy, excited, chill and at times, high users who shared parts of their exciting lives with the community. This led to some folks causing uproar about the insensitivity of these folks online. But essentially this was all people could do to connect with each other. There can be varying opinions on this, but in one way or the other, there can be a unanimous agreement on the fact that social media was a saviour for all sorts of people throughout the lockdown.

Slowly things started to get better, the unlock started and the precautions, naturally, started to decrease. This eventually led to the second wave hitting.