With the recent pandemic, people are forced to be confined to their homes much more than before. Self isolation to prevent the spread of the virus by the population caused a drastic change in many peoples’ lives, especially the lives of people who are very used to going outdoors for entertainment. This unprecedented and abrupt change in lifestyle impacted the lives of many people. People working at home, the reliance on deliveries in order to avoid human contact, the pandemic has shaped our world to force us to be able to live by ourselves.
As a result of more people flocking online for entertainment, this confinement changed how people used the internet. According to the New York Times, Facebook saw a 27% increase, Netflix saw a 16% increase, and YouTube saw a 15.3% increase in users on their already massive userbase.
Obviously with social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, its average daily users along with the businesses that run a page had to change how they managed these platforms as well. The coronavirus led to significant discussions online. Roseman University of Health Sciences conducted a research on these discussions, and suggests that understanding these discussions can help institutions, governments, and individuals navigate themselves during the pandemic. Their method of research implemented AI to analyze Twitter data in the United States from March 20th to April 19th of 2020, and mainly focused on COVID-19 discussions.
The following figure shows the social network graphs of topics with a dominant influence, along with the top 10 words that associated with the topic. The node size per word is proportional to the weight of the edges connected to it. The analysis shows that among the 5 topics, the closeness centrality measure is highest for emotional support, indicating that it is likely associated with each of the other discussions.
The discussion of mental health is important during this period of time, as the feeling of isolation and loneliness is hugely amplified in those who are not used to this style of living. As social media is known to create echo chambers and bubble type communities, the negative effects of social media use was also amplified.
The following heatmap shows the average sentiment score of the states in the country. Darkness of the state colors associated with negative sentiment scores, and lighter colors associated with positive sentiments scores.
Their research done indicated that positive sentiment outweighed negative sentiment. Public sentiment data is important to the efforts towards the coronavirus relief, and can help guide government workers and businesses with information allowing them to make impactful decisions.
What we can take away from these results is that adapting to an issue of this scale is very difficult. The pandemic’s impact on the healthcare sector in every country is immense, and the timing could not have been worse for the global economy. People now need more emotional support than ever, and the social changes that resulted from this forced the population to find new ways to interact with peers and loved ones. With the grimness of the statistics of the pandemic, and increased stress from the uncertainty of how the situation is, people can only hope for things to get better. But with the capabilities of technology and scientists today committing to a cure and solutions to the many problems, we can have faith that everyday life will go back to normal soon.
Sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/07/technology/coronavirus-internet-use.html