Social distancing and the internet made me a better person

Anula Wiwatowska - Offsite Editorial Lead

Last updated 14 May 2020

2020 has clearly not been a great year for any of us. Yet despite the odds, the isolated lifestyle we’ve adopted has made me a better person - and I have the internet to thank for it.

Mary Shelley famously wrote that “nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change”. Initially those changes, piled one atop another in COVID-19 Australia were more than painful. They were an excruciating metamorphosis, tearing every sinewed muscle in a different direction. Offices closed down, restaurants and pubs shuttered their windows, and my friends and I slapped bandaids on each new wound, clinking Corona bottles together in rebellion until even that sound was silenced.

So many doors had closed and no windows were opening in response, so we as a society did the only logical thing and sledgehammered through the walls in order to see the sun. My weapon of choice - the internet.

Counter-intuitive as it might be, the imprisonment inside my own home has pushed me to connect with people in a way I never thought I could embrace.

As an extrovert with social anxiety, I am perpetually overwhelmed and energised in social situations. It leads to ranting, avoiding eye-contact, and talking over people lest I miss the chance to tell my anecdote. But being forced into social interactions from behind a laptop camera has challenged every one of these foibles. Without worrying about eye contact, or reading social cues I’ve left every Zoom meeting taking in and contributing more productively than I would in person.

Don’t get me wrong, I'm still partial to a wine induced rant on a company Zoom, but the platform has a way of pushing you into your chair to listen.

Not only that, I've spent more time in the past two months reaching out to old friends than I ever would have. Normally I’m an in-person or nothing kind of friend, letting messages gently slide away to the bottom of my DMs. In a time when even our best friends feel lightyears away, WhatsApping old ones doesn’t seem as foreign anymore. There is something about our joint trauma that is reconnecting relationships that otherwise might be long lost to the ages.

My family was raised to be fiercely independent, so we’re not the group to call for a chat. Until earlier this year I hadn’t spoken to one of my brothers in months, not from any animosity, just because it didn’t feel necessary.

COVID-19 changed that.

Now my family has a group chat where we regularly touch base, exchange Seinfeld references, and mess with our parents. For a family that lives across two states and three countries, the joint experience of COVID-19 has bonded us more than weddings, children, and living with six of us in two bedrooms ever did.

It’s not just personal connections though, once we got the call to pack up shop and work from home, it was hard to imagine a situation where work could continue on as normal without an office environment. Without meetings, Friday afternoon drinks, and colleagues as sounding boards, would it even be possible to keep a business afloat let alone morale up?

But we, like many other organisations proved that assumption wrong. With a laptop and an internet connection work continued as normal, albeit from our separate household cubicles rather than an open plan office. Rather than sliding a chair, we now slide into Slack to collaborate - bouncing ideas back and forth over coffee, wine, and corresponding emojis.

Meetings and Friday drinks continue unscathed, piling ourselves into Zoom meetings armed with Snap Camera filters and virtual backgrounds. As of next week, I will have been working from home longer than I worked from the office, but thanks to a bustling online discord I still feel connected to my colleagues, perhaps even more so than eight weeks of lunches could account for.

Most mornings I consider what this pandemic would have looked like in an internet-less world. Even 10 years ago we wouldn’t be afforded the same concessions we have today. Facebook chat only became readily accessible in 2011, Zoom is just 9 years old, and group video chat on an ADSL connection was near impossible. 10 years ago I wouldn’t have my work stored on the cloud, accessible from anywhere I can plug a laptop in. 10 years ago we couldn’t pile into a group chat and share a drink with family members across the world.

10 years ago, I picture longer lines out the front of Centrelink, millions more Australians forced into unemployment due to working from just not being as feasible. I see people schlepping back and forth from offices, coughing secretly behind masks. The COVID-19 pandemic is catastrophic, but without the reach the internet provides, it would have been so much worse.

I know my household is one of the lucky ones. Neither my husband nor myself felt the sting of job loss, and none of our loved ones got sick. We didn’t have children to homeschool, and neither of us spent our days on the front line, battling this imperceptible fog. It’s easy for me to look at the positives, but it’s also abruptly clear to me that my experience is the exception and not the rule. But COVID-19 and the society we are under its thumb has made me more connected to the people in my life, and I suspect I'm not alone.

As doors open once again tomorrow, and ‘the new normal’ begins to resemble the old once more, I hope we don’t fall back into old routines. I hope I remember enough to listen, or to be the first to send a text. I hope I keep talking to old friends and family, and typing words that matter into a Google Doc.

No, the internet may not have been the saving grace for everyone, but I can’t imagine going through this ordeal without it. Change has come suddenly and with great pain, but armed with my router and a group of good friends, I'm emerging from this metamorphosis better than I was before.

Anula Wiwatowska

Offsite Editorial Lead | Instagram

Anula is the Off-Site Editorial Lead for WhistleOut Australia, and an award winning tech journalist. She has been writing about the Australian telco industry, and consumer technology for over five years, and has been known to tell her Uber driver which phone they should upgrade to next.

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