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’.

But that was then. At this moment in time, lest we and others die, real life means being confined to our homes, banned from congregating in public spaces. ‘Physical distancing’ would be more accurate phraseology, but instead we call it ‘social distancing’, our language betraying that we think of social and physical proximity as being the same thing. In this new version of ‘in real life’, though, we have no choice. If we are to socially connect with people outside of our own household, we will largely have to do it online.

Mental-health practitioners have long peered at the online environment through the sceptical lens of technophobia.

People who once drew hard distinctions between online communication and ‘real life’ contact are now less certain. The media’s technophobic discourse has turned technophilic overnight. The very experts who once encouraged us to put down our phones to promote mental health are now telling us to pick them up to ward off mental illness. Among those turncoat experts are therapeutic professionals, my colleagues.