From an article The New York Times titled “Big Tech’s Domination of Business Reaches New Heights”:
The tech companies’ dominance of the stock market is propelled by their unprecedented reach into our lives, shaping how we work, communicate, shop and relax. That has only deepened during the pandemic, and as people shop more frequently on Amazon, click on a Google or Facebook ad or pay up for an iPhone, the companies receive a greater share of spending in the economy and earn ever larger profits. This is why investors have flocked to those stocks this year at the expense of the scores of companies struggling in the health crisis, and are betting that their position will be unassailable for years.
With the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic I have spent most I my time at home, working and away from friends and family. I therefore have had to significantly make use of video chat for work meetings and meeting loved ones. In an article on Vox, Adam Clark Estes writes about the history of this technology and how these changes are shaping our lives and the technology itself:
(…) hosting a party with a video chat component certainly sounds less weird today than it would have six months ago. If it was already evident that videoconferencing had become a mainstay of many offices, that it could be a prominent part of our social lives is a new idea to me. That explains my initial surprise when the folks from Microsoft Teams started telling me how their workplace software had taken on new roles, like social networking, in many users’ lives. In other words, the pandemic has fundamentally changed our relationship with these tools and with digital spaces generally.
The article further delves in the changes made to the technology to make more pleasant to use. Read the full article here.
Prof. Ron Anderson writes at The Society Pages about the importance of thrust during the Covid-19 pandemic. He gives an overview of different types of social thrust that have been theorised by classical sociologists and how their insights may apply to our current situation.
As the pandemic continues to disrupt society, we will see more clearly how the social forces of trust and solidarity influence peoples’ beliefs, attitudes and social relationships. Probably we will see even more clearly how the erosion and absence of trust leaves us fewer and fewer options. Despite the growth in size and complexity of societies today, trust resides at the center of our understanding of social life. No wonder the notion of trust helps us understand life during the pandemic.
Read the full article here.
The coronavirus pandemic is changing a lot our daily lives, sometimes in small but significant ways. This article from South China Morning Post writes about one such change in Asia: “As Covid-19 changes chopstick habits, diners ponder how to keep family love and intimacy alive”.
In an article at The New York Times, Victoria Turk writes about “How the Coronavirus Is Changing Digital Etiquette”:
The pandemic has caused the way we communicate to evolve, and our relationship with technology is being pushed into new territory. Although states are slowly reopening, much of our professional and personal lives will continue to be lived almost entirely online for the foreseeable future. Digital etiquette rules remain more important now than ever.
From an article by Slavoj Žižek at the blog “In the moment” from Critical Inquiry:
More than open barbarism, I fear barbarism with a human face – ruthless survivalist measures enforced with regret and even sympathy but legitimized by expert opinions. A careful observer easily noticed the change in tone in how those in power address us: they are not just trying to project calm and confidence, they also regularly utter dire predictions – the pandemic is likely to take about two years to run its course, and the virus will eventually infect 60-70 percent of the global population, with millions of dead. . . In short, their true message is that we’ll have to curtail the basic premise of our social ethics: the care for the old and weak.
Full article here.
The current measures taken to contain the coronavirus pandemic have included the temporary closer of most offices around the world. An unprecedented event, with so many people working from home. It is interesting to think about the long term consequences for office. Catherine Nixey at The Economist 1843 magazine has published an article about the “Death of the office”.
Vox made this important video where they “deconstruct one particularly popular chart of covid-19 cases around the world which uses a logarithmic scale, and explain how to avoid being misled by it.”.