We once scorned online relationships, assuming connections made in real life were somehow more meaningful. But with the Covid-19 pandemic keeping us apart, our digital social spaces have suddenly become more vital. We must learn to recognise bonds formed online as just as important as any others. 

Before coronavirus, many of us were engaged in a pitched battle with our smartphones. Increasingly convinced that our time on social media was like a cancer, eating away at our potential for purposeful and valuable lives, we deleted apps from phones and fretted over our children’s screen time.

Before coronavirus, the mainstream media skewed technophobic and fuelled our fear that the digital revolution might prove even more toxic to society than the industrial revolution had been before it. The industrial revolution destroyed livelihoods and created capitalist robber barons, but the digital revolution introduced AI automation and data-exploiting social-media plutocrats. We fantasised about a return to the pre-digital Garden of Eden, before the snakes came. Those were the days of social connections ‘in real life’.