Virtually social

In the spirit of pos­i­tiv­ity that I vowed to main­tain for this col­umn since 2020 started so atro­ciously, I will en­deav­our to give par­ents a lit­tle com­fort re­gard­ing their con­cerns over their off­springs’ on­line habits since the start of the pan­demic and the seem­ingly dev­as­tat­ing as­so­ci­ated ef­fects of lock­down.

My own son has just turned eigh­teen, and as reg­u­lar read­ers will know, he lost his mother to can­cer at the start of 2020, just be­fore we were hit by the coro­novirus. What you will not know is that he also lost his ma­ter­nal grand­fa­ther soon after that. Per­haps it is not pos­si­ble to imag­ine what this past year has been like for him, if those cir­cum­stances are added to those of the pan­demic.

As his fa­ther, I do every­thing I can to make sure he is emo­tion­ally cared for, but one con­cern I hear a lot is how lock­down has led to young peo­ple not being able to so­cialise and there­fore miss­ing out on es­sen­tial so­cial con­tact. Be­fore I at­tempt to put my op­ti­mistic slant on that, let me first say that this is un­doubt­edly true, and being forced to spend so much time at home and with­out real phys­i­cal con­tact with friends and ex­tended fam­ily, es­pe­cially grand­par­ents for ob­vi­ous rea­sons, will have left a mark on this gen­er­a­tion of young­sters.

How­ever, per­haps the first thing worth men­tion­ing is just what a for­tu­nate gen­er­a­tion of young­sters they had been up to this point, at least those liv­ing here in Cat­alo­nia. No wars, eco­nomic com­fort and in­deed un­prece­dented ma­te­r­ial wealth for many, Cat­alo­nia being such a well-off coun­try com­pared to oth­ers. In fact, many young peo­ple born here since the turn of the cen­tury have had a very com­fort­able and dare I say it even spoilt up­bring­ing. Again, I should point out that I’m not talk­ing about every­one here, but cer­tainly a high num­ber of Cata­lan young­sters, who are con­stantly found to be among the hap­pi­est chil­dren in com­par­a­tive aca­d­e­mic stud­ies on the topic.

Now to the point at hand: what I’ve come to re­alise after not months but years of pes­ter­ing my son to “be more so­cial”, by which I meant get out and so­cialise more, is that it is ac­tu­ally per­fectly pos­si­ble to main­tain a highly sat­is­fac­tory so­cial life on­line. I can feel par­ents’ and ed­u­ca­tors’ wrath as I write these lines, but hang on a minute. Older gen­er­a­tions like mine, and es­pe­cially in­di­vid­u­als like my­self, who spent their youth at­tend­ing par­ties and get-to­geth­ers on an al­most daily basis, find it sim­ply in­com­pre­hen­si­ble that meet­ing on­line could even come close as a sub­sti­tute for that face-to-face con­tact. But we for­get that our chil­dren are dig­i­tal na­tives, and we merely dig­i­tal im­mi­grants, and al­though the use of tech­nol­ogy can cer­tainly be­come an abuse, we should be not only thank­ful but also highly ap­pre­cia­tive of the so­cial op­por­tu­ni­ties of­fered by mod­ern net­work­ing ap­pli­ca­tions. Can you imag­ine what lock­down would have been like with­out them? No Skype, Zoom, even Face­book? I won’t men­tion the newer ones be­cause I haven’t even heard of most of them, but I do know that from the most har­row­ing of pe­ri­ods what I will al­ways re­mem­ber is hear­ing my son through his bed­room door laugh­ing rau­cously with friends for hours on end to dis­pel my fears that his lack of so­cial con­tact would make a mis­er­able year so much worse.