Pilar Lacasa
Nelson Zagalo
Martin Emmer- 1Department of Philology, Communication and Documentation, University of Alcalá, Alcalá de Henares, Spain
- 2DigiMedia—Digital Media and Interaction, University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal
- 3Institute for Media and Communication Studies, Freie Universität Berlin/Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, Berlin, Germany
Editorial on the Research Topic
Digital/Online Networks in Everyday Life During Pandemics
This topic examines how sociocultural networks and platforms help to generate dynamic forms of culture associated with connectivity in everyday life during pandemics. Environment defines the peoples' lives and the COVID pandemic, as a global phenomenon has disrupted everyday reality and turned our attention in many directions (Abdel-Raheem, 2021; Kopecka-Piech and Łódzki, 2022). The viewpoints of the articles grouped in this issue are a good example of these everyday changes that are reflected in multiple aspects of peoples' lives. The collection has been generated from an interdisciplinary approach. Different theoretical perspectives coexist, and all the studies base their interpretations on the data, which are related to different points of view to the reality of life during the pandemic. They apply different methodologies, both quantitative and qualitative, and the need to look for new methods to replace personal contact with other forms of data collection is highlighted (Marzi, 2021).
The pandemic has generated collective frames of interpretation, figurative worlds that have conditioned the daily lives of people and researchers (Holland et al., 1998). This is the starting point of this editorial, the idea that these universes are filled with objects and actors to which meanings are attributed, collectively and culturally; they are dynamic and change according to events. Not all people perceive the situation in the same way, nor do the media or governments, or even researchers. Strategies of control, care and surveillance have been introduced; for example, Andrejevic et al. (2021) speak of careful surveillance, associated with different forms of power, to describe this context. Different reactions have been generated among people, sometimes sheltering at home for fear of the virus and sometimes protesting in the streets against controls that mark social distance, physical spaces, and people's daily lives. Moreover, these situations have also been guided both by social networks and by the traditional media, the press or television, very often focused on quantitative data that are difficult to interpret but which have the potential to generate panic (Milan, 2020; Arriaga et al., 2021).
The studies included below show the researchers' view of the world around them in a lockdown situation, also reinterpreted by the perspective of the editors. When this monographic issue was proposed, we were not sure what topics we would find. Today we have grouped them around three cores from which it is possible to establish relationships between the different contributions: first, digital technology as a mediator of everyday practices; second, changes in interpersonal relationships and in the contexts that delimit them; third, the role of social networks in times of pandemics.
Digital technology has entered society in ways that would have been unthinkable only a short time ago. Physical spaces and tools have been transformed (Poom et al., 2020). The use of digital materials has come to the fore, changing leisure, everyday life, work or learning situations. In our view, four articles highlight this perspective. Vladova et al., Students' Acceptance of Technology-Mediated Teaching analyses the responses of German university students to technology in the context of different teaching models. The differences between disciplines emerge as a relevant variable to consider when considering the online use of technology in teaching and learning. For their part, Meier et al., Alone Together: Computer-Mediated Communication in Leisure Time, show leisure situations in which the computer mediates communicative situations as a means to avoid loneliness; in this case personality-related factors, e.g., introversion or extraversion, may or may not contribute to users' acceptance. The transformation of other leisure experiences more directly related to informal education, specifically in museums, is shown by Chen et al., Participating in Online Museum Communities; for these authors, experiences that occur outside the museum, through digital communities, contribute to improving visitors' experiences. Finally, Martínez-Borda et al., Digital Narratives During the Pandemic, analyse the interpretations of streaming television series during the most restrictive period of closure in Spain, in entertainment situations.
Social interactions have been transformed because people have lived indoors, living together for much longer than usual with those who, before the pandemic, probably only did so at certain times of the day (Newson et al., 2021). At the same time, situations of inequality (Brown and Zinn, 2021) associated with risk have been created, because people do not have the same material resources to cope with imposed circumstances (De Genova, 2021). Three contributions have focused on this context. León-Nabal et al., Uses of Digital Mediation in the School-Families Relationship, refer to situations of inequality through a qualitative study that shows educational inequalities; they emphasize the digital divide and how these differences mark the relationships between families and schools in times of pandemic. González-Ceballos et al., Meaningful Learning Experiences in Everyday Life During Pandemics, show how students have been forced to combine formal and informal educational experiences that were once far apart; these new experiences have transformed social interactions and the overall framework for learning. Finally, Nuñez-Gómez et al., Critical Analysis of the Risks in the Use of the Internet and Social Networks in Childhood and Adolescence, show the intergenerational differences, specifically between children and adults, regarding the risks of Internet use among young people.
Although in one way or another most of the studies presented allude to social networks, some make them the object of study, as they have become an extension of society that could not meet physically. Moreover, while governments are sending out messages through regulations or the classic media, people are looking for answers in social networks (LaPoe et al., 2021). A new social life is being experienced, in this case online, and new narratives associated with them are created (Petteway, 2020). Even those who spoke of the importance of disconnection (Kaun, 2021) have had the opportunity to approach new contexts in which connectivity becomes almost a form of survival. Three papers have been grouped around this core. Islam et al., Understanding Knowledgeable Workers' Behavior Toward COVID-19 Information Sharing, analyse people's motivations that lead them to share information. If in pre-pandemic situations the motives for using WhatsApp were related to leisure, now the motivations have been transformed: individuals do not share information for fun, but seek to disseminate authentic information. From a different perspective, Bowden-Green et al., Personality and Motives for Social Media Use When Physically Distance, found that people also use social networks to pass the time and maintain contacts that would otherwise take place on a personal basis. Finally Ye et al., The Relationship Between Fear of COVID-19 and Online Aggressive Behavior, analyse the role of social networks in the political and social context of China by looking at the presence of aggressive behavior, which users would justify as a way of being outside the rules in certain circumstances. To explain this they use the concept of moral disengagement.
In short, we are confronted with multiple perspectives from which to approach the pandemic in the social sciences, and there are many others that must undoubtedly be taken into account. The relevance of those presented here lies in the fact that the interpretations of a phenomenon as complex as COVID-19 are anchored in different types of data, obtained under difficult conditions that transformed people's personal and community lives.
Author Contributions
All authors listed have made a substantial, direct, and intellectual contribution to the work and approved it for publication.
Funding
PL received support for working in this Research Topic by the European Regional Development Funds (European Union), the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (MINECO) Reference RTI2018-098916-B-I00, and the Autonomous Community of Castilla La Mancha Reference SBPLY/17/180501/000186.
Conflict of Interest
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Publisher's Note
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Acknowledgments
Thanks and gratitude to all the authors who proposed their work, all the researchers who reviewed the submissions to this Research Topic and the Frontiers people for the editorial support.
References
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Keywords: COVID-19, coronavirus, social networks, technology, digital, everyday life, entertainment, learning
Citation: Lacasa P, Zagalo N and Emmer M (2022) Editorial: Digital/Online Networks in Everyday Life During Pandemics. Front. Comput. Sci. 4:887604. doi: 10.3389/fcomp.2022.887604
Received: 01 March 2022; Accepted: 02 March 2022;
Published: 24 March 2022.
Edited and reviewed by: Anton Nijholt, University of Twente, Netherlands
Copyright © 2022 Lacasa, Zagalo and Emmer. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Pilar Lacasa, cC5sYWNhc2EmI3gwMDA0MDt1YWguZXM=
†These authors share first authorship