A World After COVID: The Dangers of Digitalization
By Marina Avilova ’23
It’s inescapable. After the pandemic, not everything will be in-person. New aspects of our society will be virtual—for good. Even before the pandemic, the economy had already shifted in favor of online platforms such as Amazon, and many workplaces had already implemented more digitally accessible structures. What’s more, working and learning from home have become more normalized than ever. For better or for worse, we have given our personal information to more and more establishments, like delivery services, social media companies and search engines. We can’t escape the Internet.
We ought to tread carefully, though—making further efforts to fine tune the digitalization of schools and workplaces will lead to a burnt-out and divided world.
We find comfort in rolling out of bed and directly going to a virtual class. We do not find comfort, though, in staring at a screen for eight hours, trying to smile through the last discussion of the day. Even if the latter is a necessity for now, it can’t be permanent. If we were all forced to log on and feign joy through an 8p.m. class in a post-pandemic, non-socially distanced world, the mental and physical state of people everywhere would plummet. Zoom is no permanent solution.
We even have a term for the feeling—Zoom fatigue. Undoubtedly, it will exacerbate already widespread anxiety and depression and foster a sense of disconnect. We cannot forget that staying stationary at a screen for long periods of time is in fact bad for you.
But to illustrate what I mean, let’s imagine a world permanently changed by COVID, permanently more digitalized.
In such an overly-connected world, people will crave real-life interaction more than they ever did before. One might argue that seeing other people over Zoom even amplifies this need. A perpetual lack of face-to-face contact drastically reduces the “happy hormones” in people’s systems, to put it crudely. Aristotle puts it more elegantly—“Man, by nature, is a social animal.”
A hyper-digitalized future also poses significant equity issues. Those who had a chance to work remotely before the pandemic will have no trouble carrying on. People in the service and health industries, however, will not be able to transition to the new world, and a society tailored to virtual interaction will undoubtedly disadvantage them. And people without internet access? Many won’t be able to access our main venues of communication and news. This is already a problem, and if we proceed carelessly, it’ll be a major problem, particularly outside America.
It’s also worth remembering that not every country could participate in our digitalized world. “If left unaddressed, the yawning gap between under-connected and hyper-digitalized countries will widen, thereby exacerbating existing inequalities,” the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development Technology and Logistics Director, Shamika Sirimanne, says.
She’s right—countries with low internet access will not be able to participate in the new world’s economy. Perhaps that problem is somewhat inevitable, but what do we do? A way to fix that would be to work on spreading Internet access throughout the world, but is that our first priority right now? A better way to concentrate our effort and money would be on protecting people’s fundamental rights, health and living conditions.
The world is becoming increasingly digital, which is a great sign of newfound accessibility for many. It was like this before the pandemic, too, but the concept has become more popularized by necessity. You can watch a Stanford lecture at 9p.m. and take a walk through Louvre an hour later. That’s a great thing. But putting emphasis on expanding those possibilities without acknowledging that our technology can rip us apart too is a mistake.
The virtual landscape evolves on its own, and it is our responsibility to make sure that it doesn’t hinder our health and wellbeing—as individuals and as a global society.