By Elizabeth Surbrook, Logan Honshell, and Elle Nienhuis

In this time of COVID-19, we mainly rely on technology to communicate with one another. Technology can be defined as the devices and equipment used for practical purposes in our daily lives.  In terms of schooling, we have had to communicate with some of my classmates through my laptop (hybrid learning). Hybrid learning means that we have the choice to be either in person or attend class virtually. Two of us are virtual students, which entails that we are expected to join the zoom for class every single day to participate in class, but often feel as though we are not really a part of the class since we are not physically in the classroom. Additionally, as virtual students, it can be difficult to participate in class because we don’t want to feel as though we are interrupting the flow of class. Sometimes, our internet connection can be very weak and can prevent us from joining the zoom meetings and getting the materials we need for class. Our microphones as well as video can also cut out, preventing us to speak our voice in class as well as the teacher’s video cutting out so we might miss information. One of us is an in-person, in which we feel more included in the class as possibly compared to virtual students due to us being physically in class. Only being able to talk to some of our classmates through our computer screens can cause a feeling of disconnect between us, virtual and in-person students. Having to adapt to this new normal with the aid of technology has affected how we communicate, our daily routines or rituals, and the boundaries that were previously in place.

Communication Technology and Virtual Learning

As an online student, communication has been one of the biggest changes for me during the covid-19 situation. Technology has made it possible to be online and yet feel like you are in person. Whereas before I could go to teachers or meet with my peers in person, I now communicate 100% virtually. Language is a human universal, essential to human survival and culture, which allows cultural knowledge to be passed from one generation to the next, so having it be limited has definitely altered the way I operate. I find myself using different applications such as the Teams chat feature, email, GroupMe, Zoom and more just to stay in touch with those around me. People try to classify change as either productive or counterproductive, however, there are places where it can be both simultaneously. Although technology has been a great resource, that is not to say that the transition has been an easy one. In my experience, it is hard to communicate with the teachers during class because unmuting myself on the Zoom video feels like an interruption to the students in person. Although we are there virtually, there is an unavoidable disconnect between the virtual students and the rest of the class. In addition to in class communication, communication with my peers outside of class has also been impacted by the coronavirus. One friend and I have began to FaceTime daily after school in order to keep in touch. During these video calls, we discuss things such as funny moments from class, new hobbies we have picked up to pass the time during the pandemic, and books we are reading. It is moments like these that make virtual learning feel not as isolating. For me, the decrease in communication has been one of the downsides of being completely virtual, so although technology has made the change possible and fairly easy, socially, it has been much more difficult.

Boundaries of Hybrid Learning

I’m an in-person student so when there is an assignment I have to work on with people who are online, there are, of course, going to be some boundaries that form. Especially with a global pandemic going on, technology has both made boundaries as well as destroyed some boundaries. Thanks to technology, I am able to talk to my peers about work without having to go anywhere. In contrast, a boundary has been made between the people online quarantining and the people who are not since we don’t see each other in person until they return to campus. Even though technology has made it easier to talk to peers during this pandemic, the movement of boundaries is not as easy. All assignments are mainly done on a computer, and there are some difficulties with that. In math class, taking notes on a computer is difficult because I’m trying to make sure I get all the information down, but I have to make text boxes and input special symbols that slows my typing ability. When I’m in classes in person, we stay 6-feet apart in order to maintain social distancing. With the case of hybrid learning, there is already social distancing between the online and in-person students since the virtual students are at home joining the class on Zoom. In the cases of both virtual and in-person students, there are, of course, different boundaries in place: both physical and imaginary. The concept of virtual classes in itself is a physical boundary between the students and teachers. I personally don’t like the idea of having to do school at home because I am in an environment that will get me distracted and unable to focus. This illustrates the universal that boundaries are actively maintained, especially in times of crisis, which are more actively maintained.

Quarantine and Changing Rituals

Throughout covid-19 my daily rituals have changed majorly. Rituals are a series of actions or type of behavior regularly followed. Rituals can be found in all cultures. Before covid, every day I would wake up at 6:00 to get ready for school, get in my truck, and stop and get breakfast on the way to school, however, now that I am at home, I don’t do this anymore. Now a normal day for me is to wake up around 8. I still get ready and eat breakfast, but I don’t leave to go anywhere. Then I just get on my phone and get on snapchat and Instagram and look at the new posts that were posted while I was asleep until 9 when my first class starts. In between this time my mom will usually come tell me bye before she goes and starts her day. Previously, I would have been the one saying goodbye to her when she was getting ready. After she tells me bye, I go to my desk and open my laptop to start my classes for most of the day. I do work at my desk which is unlike when I went to school because I used to talk to my friends in class and with zoom, that can’t be done unless you want to disrupt the whole class. Another ritual that was changed was hanging out with my friends after school and going to sports games. After Covid, I still do hangout with my friends but only on the weekend and at places like Shelby farms where can be outside and socially distanced. We only go between like 12-4 now because the sun has started setting early, and the park closes at sunset.

Conclusion

This auto ethnography shows the new life of students during this quarantined school year and how technology has had a huge impact on both the virtual and in person learners. Auto ethnography is a form of qualitative research in which an author uses self-reflection and writing. According to Brent Luvaas in his ethnography of street style blogging titled Street Style, “In auto-ethnography self-reflexivity is a mechanism for creating a more honest, situated, and grounded form of social scientific research” (Luvaas, 12). Auto-ethnography is a useful method of study because it challenges one to be reflective. We hope that our auto-ethnography properly represented and reflected on the current state of our lives as we face this global pandemic. Luvaas also writes, “Auto-ethnography does not just use the self to do research; it is explicitly about the ‘self’ as the medium through which research transpired” (Luvaas, 12). Auto-ethnography is unique in that the self is both the research method and the topic of research. Who better than ourselves to talk about what is going on in our lives? Through discussing our own experiences of high school during a pandemic, we allow outsiders to gain insight from our point of view.

Bibliography

Luvaas, B. (2016). Street Style: an Ethnography of Fashion Blogging. Bloomsbury Publishing.

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By: Jad Hamze, Robert Dyson, and Lucie Finley

As students of KTH school, our identities have changed drastically. We have experienced complex social isolation, new forms of learning and how our hobbies have turned virtual. COVID 19 has had an immense shift in our day to day lives we once knew. The students of 2021 in KTH school, experienced considerable and ongoing changes their senior year. As students and individuals, we have been forced to navigate the educational options being either in virtual learning or in person learning. Both forms have rules that students must adhere to. If one is a virtual student, they must login to the Zoom link at 9 AM because that is when our classes start. As a virtual student, you are required to show your face while school is in session. KTH teachers want to make sure that you are engaged in the lesson at hand. You may remain muted unless you are needed during the class and in that case you unmute yourself. However when there is a break given, you have the liberty of turning off your screen to do anything you need to do to reenergize. If your choice is to be in person there are also rules that students must abide to.  While in class, students must keep their masks on and practice social distancing to lessen the spread. We only really do not have our masks on when it is break time (if you brought a snack) and lunch. Also, in person students are responsible for bringing their own water bottles in order to not have everyone touching the water fountains. KTH school includes water bottle refill stations controlled by foot. When it is lunch time, students go to their advisory and eat lunch with them every day. Our advisory has the same teacher and students and it is a small knit group, so we get to know everyone very well. Although our day to day education is constantly changing, we are still receiving some variation of our education either virtually or in person.

Extended Isolation Effects

I feel like teenagers all over the world witnessed a massive shift in identity with the extended period of isolation that adolescents universally underwent over the past year. One’s identity is contingent on their sense of group belonging, essentially being one with a certain group, and this idea of belonging was globally hindered when stuck in quarantine for months on end (Pountney and Marić, 145). An aspect of identity I felt affected by was the way that I socially interacted among those I had social relations with. A social relation can comprise any relationship between two or more individuals, and typically speaking, when any sort of interaction is carried out, the identity of the folk within that interaction have a large effect on how the relation goes. For the most part, my peers and I found ourselves stuck inside for about three months (March to May) without any real interactions other than with our direct family members. I would say it was premature, but when people decided to go back out again, it felt as if I had lost an aspect of my identity that had made me such an outgoing and social person. A universal regarding social relationships and specifically human organization is that humans organize themselves into complex social relationships, and the relationships that we put ourselves in after extended quarantine were complex to say the least.

A specific example of this occurring, was when I saw some of my school peers for the first time in months in July. Having had the majority of our relationships carried out online through apps like Snapchat and iMessage’s, seeing others in person was really awkward at first. For three months, the development of our identity was significantly stunted, and I remember when my friend, CH, asked me “what’s new with you”, I had nothing to say. For that period of time, I had very little development in my identity and aspects of my personhood. Having gone through the unprecedented with all my peers, when poised with such a question, my response was the same as the person next to me. I spent time online, on my electronics, virtually communicating and doing online school. Everything was new but at the same time everyone was doing it so it wasn’t really new, it was average. If you had told me how my life would’ve changed three months before the whole pandemic, I would believe that it was all strange, but doing things like online school are now the new norm, an aspect of my identity and life that everyone had experienced. I used to feel very awkward when asserting myself into complex social relationships, but what I have started to notice is that everyone has been going through the unprecedented and that our social relations and identities have all been stunted in some sense, making it a universal hinderance.

Diary Entry of an Online Student

On December 1, 2020, I woke up at 8:50. This was one of the few times my alarm clock actually woke me up, usually it has to go off 2 more time before I get out of bed. Once I’m awake all I have to do is put some clothes on, walk over to the desk in my room and login to my computer  to be in class by 9:00. I stay logged in to my first class from 9:00 to 11:50. I had math class first, which is fine because I like my math class. Math class on zoom isn’t very difficult, I just watch learn through zoom and take notes to remember what the teacher teaches us. After we get dismissed from class we go on lunch break until 12:50. I had a bowl of cinnamon toast crunch cereal during my lunch break, I eat 1 or 2 bowls of cereal every day. I eat, brush my teeth, and  shower before its 12:50, then I have to login my next class which was Dance for athletes. I like dance class because it gives me a break so I don’t have to sit down in front of my computer all day. In dance class I stand in front of my computer camera and participate in yoga, ballet and other dance exercises. This class ends at and school is over at 3:40. At 3:40 once the class is over and the teacher has dismissed the students, Online students like myself can simply leave the zoom meeting and carry on with the rest of their day. My identity as an online student comes with rituals and responsibilities that I have to keep, for example keeping my eyes on camera, logging into class on time and most importantly KTH. KTH is a shared social memory among the students of our school because we know that KTH stands for Knowledge, Truth, and Honor. This school motto is especially important for online kids because we can’t physically be supervised by any teachers while we work.

My Adjustments to Quarantine

Ever since COVID 19 started in March, new forms of communication have had to come into play. Communication is a systematic set of meaningful learned symbols and signs shared among a group. Zoom has been an immense factor in the way that humans all over the world have been communicating. Globalization is the increasing interdependence of the world’s economies, cultures and population. Like everyone else, I have had to adjust to a much more virtual world we are now living in. The main way in which I use Zoom is to participate in my virtual voice lessons. For obvious reasons, my voice teacher and I both decided to continue my vocal journey on Zoom in order to still participate in my lessons. I am given a Zoom code/password and show up at the same time being 4:30 pm accordingly. Just like many individuals, I have had to navigate the world of Zoom.

Over my time, I have come to observe many different aspects of my virtual voice lessons. We have a living room with a piano in which I keep my music. I always login to Zoom on my phone and I have learned now that my phone microphone can pick up sound very well. Often times when I would do my vocal warm ups, I would have to take a step back because if I was too close to the microphone, the volume of my voice would be much to loud because of my teacher playing the piano and my voice. So, I learned that technology is very sensitive to noise and if I am too close then it is not as effective. Also, I came to realize that it is often hard to hear the piano over Zoom. My teacher now plays one note on the piano to give me my vocal pitch and then I start singing. He does this because if he tries to play a whole song, it does not come all the way through for me to hear. I have now observed that I am much more independent when one note is being played because I have to keep the song going. Listening to karaoke versions of the song for a couple times helps me feel more confident in my independence as a musician. As many of us are working through Zoom, I know that we have all had to learn how to work independently and strategically. We are all in this new technological community together which in a way is little less scary. All humans around the world have had to better their selves with technology because that is the main source of communication right now.

Conclusion

These paragraphs give us an idea of how identity can be affected by sudden change. This year we have all had to overcome obstacles and find way to adapt and persevere when met with challenges. Technology has helped us so much by giving us ways to virtually go to school. All the online students in our school learn how to properly use zoom so that they will be able to actively participate in the class from home. Student and Teachers who were at the school however, had to learn how to work with the online students and engage with them through a computer screen.  Brent Luvaas makes a comment on technology on page 15 saying “They often work in technology or creative industries and their work as bloggers, whether professional or avocational, requires access to personal computers, an internet connection, and experience camera equipment out of reach to large portions of the populations”. This quote made me realized something else about the identity of our school. We have a school where we could easily transition to all virtual and afford to provide technology for students who need it. A lot of the kids in my school including me would not currently identify themselves as poor or impoverished. Luvaas also says in his book “Auto-ethnography does not just use the self to do research; it is explicitly about the ‘self’ as the medium through which research transpired.”(12). He explains how important it is to study yourself when creating an auto-ethnography. It was very important for me to look at my own habits and take notes of the little things to be able to provide detailed and educated auto-ethnography. However due to the recent COVID guidelines, I live a much more boring and sleepy life, so it wasn’t hard for me to go back and think about the things that happened in my day. From the perspective of an Online student school has only changed in the aspect that we are present virtually not physically, and this has made it so that technology is an even more crucial tool to our education than it was before. Before COVID technology was a tool that helped in education but was still optional, now for some families technology is a necessity in order to get education.

Bibliography

Luvaas, B. (2016). Street Style. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Pountney, L. and Marić, T. (2015). Introducing Anthropology. Polity Press.

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By: Kewe Chen, Cristian Gonzalez, and Kortni Owens

Human culture is made up of varying complex social relationships found in every social group around the world. Social relations are any relationships between two or more individuals in a larger network of relationships and involves an element of individual agency. Many anthropologists believe that the most significant way in which social relationships are organized is through kinship, or system of how people are related to each other (family and relations). Recently, the entire world has been forced into unprecedented situations, creating new challenges for us all. Social relations with friends, peers, coworkers, were halted as the world shut down. Through these challenges, our school has worked to offer a choice for students: to choose between returning to school and participating in classes online. In person, students are required to remain 6 feet apart at all times and wear a mask. Many precautions have been added like wiping down tables, limiting classes to 2 a day, and eating lunch with advisories. The challenges extend to online learning as it is difficult to stay engaged with the online barriers such as distractions, technical issues, and more.

The Formation of New Rituals

One of the biggest changes created from Covid-19 is the social interactions between individuals as we all have to wear masks and maintain social distancing, making it hard to communicate and form social relations as normal. Covid safety guidelines have prohibited many of the activities that aid the formation of said relationships such as hanging out with friends in public. Recently, after making the decision to switch to online learning to protect myself and my family from the virus, I realized that I barely talked to my friends because I never saw them, as compared to seeing them every day before, and communication was hindered. As a result, my friends and I agreed to facetime, which is a form of face-to-face conversation with someone. over the internet using the mobile app FaceTime. at about the same time every week, creating a new ritual between us, which are symbolic actions that help people physically express their beliefs and values and are found in all cultures throughout time and around the world. As Malinowski’s theory (Pountney and Maric, 167) about rituals said, rituals help control emotions and are important because they help to pull people together to be calm and centered, and by always making sure to always communicate and check up with those around me, it made the relationships I had stronger, which is especially needed during these difficult times. It felt extremely good to be able to talk through my feelings and listen to what others were experiencing as well. In addition, another new ritual that I have experienced was being able to spend more time with my family, specifically, always making sure to eat dinner together every night. This structured event promoted a sense of community, as my family and I have a lot more bonding time to talk through what each of us did every day and even participate in helping and learning how to cook some traditional Chinese foods, making this experience very valuable.

New Emphasis on Kinship

Personally, my family and I have become closer through the new ways of working and schooling from home, and on October 13th, I made the switch to online learning in order to protect myself and my family members from exposure to COVID. My maternal grandparents are very influential as we are a matrilineal family. This means the authority passes down through my mother’s line. (This does not align with external views from most of Western society). The week before I switched to online learning, my grandparents expressed to me that I needed to stay home from school if I wanted to be able to see them. Of course, their safety is my priority, and I decided to switch. Fast forwarding to this November, I tried to do everything in my power to see my grandparents and cousins during Thanksgiving. Unfortunately, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, I received a presumptive positive test result, meaning I had tested negative for COVID 19, but had another coronavirus. I called my grandmother, and she was very sad to hear the news. I could hear my younger cousin in the background, talking about how excited she was to eat. In my family culture, familial ties and bonding are the most important thing. This year has put a strain on it but has also allowed us to grow closer and appreciate the time we did spend together more. Kinship can be in the form of social kin, blood ties, or marriage which is present in every culture, and in turn, I think my experience with my family and the importance of kinship can be related to universally.

Impacts on Personal Identity

Over that past couple of months people have been forced into a way of learning that they may not enjoy. Hybrid learning is a type of learning that allows students to be taught virtually if they choose to or if they must. It is the form of learning that everyone, whether that like it or not has, has become accustomed to. The problem with this form of learning is lack of identification and social relations. Identification is important as it allows for people create a sense of belonging for you. Social relations can be ordered by identities; therefore it is important to understand the way people see you and how you see yourself during a time where many of us are separated. At the beginning of the pandemic my agency or free will was low because my choice to stay in person was not available. This in turn changed my identity, the qualities that define you, around and made me an online learner. Moreover, near the beginning of the pandemic in May, my sister tested positive for Covid-19. This came as a surprise as they were very few cases being announced at the time, especially in the city we live in. Because of this my sister was told to self-quarantine for two weeks in a secluded area. Not only was this difficult for her but it was hard for us as a family as well. Her sense of belonging was being sheltered in an area from us in order to keep

us safe. A social relation is a relationship between two or more individual’s in a large network often involving individual agency. During my sister’s quarantine, not only did it feel like she wasn’t there, but her social relationship with us was being attacked. Her agency, or her ability to have free will, was low. She did not have a choice, but to stay enclosed and remove her sense of belonging. Her identity as a member of our family and a healthcare worker were something that was maintained and even compelled. This was because of her lack of social relations during a two-week period. Furthermore, once we learned of her positive test, I got tested for antibodies and learned that I was exposed to Covid-19 at some point before June. This allowed me and my sister to identify as part of the covid-competent population (patients who have recovered and developed immunity to the disease).

Conclusion

Throughout these unprecedented times, social relationships have been significantly impacted, whether it be with new rituals, the relationship of one’s kinship, or personal identity, they seem to all have been challenged. This ethnographic approach used is an example of how the recording of a culture or society is important in identifying and analyzing this unexpected occurrence. Specifically, this is a visual autoethnography, a form of qualitative research in which an author uses self-reflection and writing to explore anecdotal and personal experience, where “auto-ethnography differs from ethnography not in kind, but in the degree of self-reflexivity and focus on oneself” (Luvaas, 12). Furthermore, in auto-ethnographies, “…self-reflexivity is a mechanism for creating a more honest, situated, and grounded form of social scientific research” (Luvaas, 12). We chose this more honest and approachable form of ethnography which allows us to have direct insight into people’s lives in an unprecedented situation like this one.

Bibliography

Luvaas, B. (2016) Street Style: An Ethnography of Fashion Blogging. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Pountney, L. and Marić, T. (2015). Introducing Anthropology. Polity Press.

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A College Community of (COVID) Consociated Contemporaries

by Christian Elliott

On Thursday, March 12th, I piled into a rental van with a dozen other student writing tutors from Augustana, a small liberal arts college in western Illinois. We were bound for the Midwest Writing Center Association’s annual conference in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. After a few hours of cornfield-lined interstate, we pulled into the DoubleTree hotel’s parking garage. We crowded into an elevator, joking about the oatmeal cookie smell in the air, courtesy of the Quaker Oats factory next door. COVID-19 had started to make national news, but still felt far away from Iowa’s second-largest city. We knew something was wrong, though, when we entered a deserted hotel lobby devoid of the Midwestern writing nerds we’d been expecting. Our faculty chaperone logged onto a hotel computer to check his email—sure enough, the conference had been cancelled due to concerns about the spread of the novel coronavirus, just an hour before it was scheduled to begin. With time to kill, we wandered around the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art admiring Grant Wood paintings, then all gathered around one table in a local restaurant for dinner. Sharing a restaurant table with others now is a strange and unsettling thought. I haven’t seen those twelve colleagues and friends (except in Zoom calls)—and have rarely left my family’s home—since that night. That weekend, Augustana announced classes would move online for the remainder of the term.

The front of the t-shirt that Augustana College mailed me reads “Class of 2020: We Made History.” I’m not sure how likely graduating via a YouTube video from a small liberal arts college in Illinois during a pandemic is to make the history books, but it’s a nice sentiment. Today, as I sit in my room scanning job boards and LinkedIn pages back at my childhood home in Iowa, I find myself reflecting on how radically my college experience changed in the three short months leading up to graduation. Now, with time to think, I’ve been reading social science research in an attempt to put into words, from the perspective of a recent college graduate, how different “distance learning” felt and why the success of current and future college students depends on a return to in-person learning as soon as is safely possible.

In the early 20th century, Austrian phenomenological sociologist Alfred Schutz coined the terms “consociates” and “contemporaries” to describe the differences between direct face-to-face social interactions (copresence) and indirect, mediated relationships (noncopresence) respectively (1967). Schutz believed face-to-face relationships possessed a directness, a vividness of experience not otherwise possible in indirect interactions. A group of college students sharing a classroom (or a rental van) as consociates grow older together, if just for an hour, and experience each other’s consciousnesses in an intimate continuous way until the moment they go their separate ways. The instant they separate, they exit the world of each other’s direct experiences and become contemporaries. As soon as I stepped out of the crowded van and left college and my friends behind, I was a slightly different person. As the weeks passed, I had new experiences and gained new perspectives—I began to possess a new self, different from the “yesterday self” that lives on in the memory of those I’ve left behind. I certainly possess a different self now than the one left in a Cedar Rapids restaurant with my fellow tutors almost five months ago when we last saw one another in person.

Schutz was inspired to make these distinctions because in his time, indirect and increasingly anonymous social interactions were becoming more and more common—a person could have relationships with people they read about in newspapers, with collective entities’ unknown individual members, or via telephone with people they’d met in person in the past. Contemporaries are people with whom one knows one coexists but does not experience directly anymore. In 2004, sociologist Shanyang Zhao coined the term “consociated contemporaries” to describe a novel emerging “mediated social realm” he observed—“cyberspace” communities in which individuals may share a community of time without sharing a community of physical space. For the first time, space had been torn away from place—instead of being physically present to interact with others, people could communicate “face-to-device” in what he called “telecopresence,” a condition of “electronic proximity” through which they remained within reach of the “mediated senses” of others extended by computers (Zhao 2004). We take these types of interactions for granted now, but to phenomenological sociologists in the early 21st century, they represented a dramatic restructuring of the social conditions of communication.

As an unintentional online college student this past semester, I spent long hours at my desk with a cup of coffee, sending dozens of emails, posting to discussion forums, sharing my essays online, and meeting for Zoom advising sessions. When I replied to fellow students’ forum posts, I interacted with them through telecopresence—our two separate “worlds within mediated reach” coincided briefly, and we spoke to one another, however asynchronously, with written words as consociated contemporaries. Yet, in doing so the flow my consciousness was always split—part of me was synchronized with the other student in telecopresence, while part of me remained in my room, at my desk, synchronized with my family, with whom I share my home and a relationship of corporeal copresence. We experienced, to use a term coined by biolinguist John L. Locke, “being alone together” (Locke 1998). Since Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, artists have used the term to try to capture the isolated experience of being together but alone, especially in cities. Sherry Turkle used the term to explain how technology (social media) replaces actual human connection with an unsatisfying simulacrum—McDonaldizing friendship (Bakardjieva 2014). The same phrase has now become a favorite hashtag of my college’s social media account managers and now carries even more meaning. Being alone together in this new way—communicating only through the internet—is a complicated experience, and one that has destroyed the work/home life binary. We’re all “BBC dad” now, a recent New York Times article claimed, providing some recommendations for how to prevent distractions created by children and pets in video conference calls. As a remote learner, suddenly I could no longer share a classroom with my fellow students—instead, we all lived in our own, distant physical worlds and the online one maintained through electronic mediation at the same time. We were simultaneously “linked to and buffered from” one another in complicated and challenging new ways.

More recent studies of communication, like Zhao’s, which address online interactions, have largely affirmed Alfred Schutz’s “pro-proximity” stance for the superiority of direct face-to-face interaction. Spoken language possesses an “inherent quality of reciprocity” and comes with a “rich array of bodily indices” that make face-to-face interactions uniquely reciprocally synchronous (1967). Nevertheless, the development of online communication technologies represents a fundamental change, a “new normative order” of social interaction (Zhao 2004). Electronic mediation changes both the structure and conditions which lie beneath all symbolic exchange. Through distance learning, students have been forced to navigate these new and complicated realities. For the last three months of spring semester we, along with students in colleges across the country, functioned as a community of consociated contemporaries, creating knowledge together in real time through brief connections facilitated by our laptops and internet connections. We perhaps defied Alfred Schutz’s dated definitions, but we certainly felt the loss of our pure consociate relationships with one another. To grow older with other like-minded individuals, to directly experience the sheer diversity of others—each with their own perspectives and backgrounds—in the same classroom, is a special thing, and a sad one to lose.

Some might argue that our proven capacity to learn at distance means the kind of college experience liberal arts schools like Augustana offers is overpriced and irrelevant. The Harvard Business Review, in a recent article claimed that basic-level college courses (think big lecture halls) already lack a face-to-face “social experience,” and could easily be replaced with videos and forums to reduce costs, increase efficiency, and save students time. Other articles have reconsidered old arguments for McDonaldizing college through “modularized and gamified” online programs and “boot camps”—more fiscally sensible replacements for expensive in-person college. Furthermore, the economic crisis and demand for room and board refunds have jeopardized some schools’ endowments, and others have opted not to admit a freshmen class this fall. Nationwide, colleges are set to lose $23 billion in revenue, and small private institutions are among the hardest it. Is online the inevitable future of higher education?

I’ve heard from some of my Augustana classmates, through video chat and text conversations, that they actually preferred the online class format—it was less of a time commitment they told me, you didn’t have to get dressed to “go” to class, and no one knew if you were scrolling through social media instead of watching a lecture online or responding to a forum quiz. As children of the internet, current college students are, in a way, uniquely prepared to learn online. Research has shown 95% of teenagers own smartphones today, a significant increase from just a decade ago, and 45% are online “almost constantly.” Though social scientists have been slow to take online relationships seriously, they’ve now begun studying how critical the internet is to teenage identity formation. In a 2005 follow-up paper to the “consociated contemporaries” article, Shanyang Zhao develops the concept of the “digital self,” constructed through online interaction. To make his point, Zhao builds on a long tradition of symbolic interactionism traceable to sociologist Charles Cooley. In 1902, Cooley described how our conception of who we are develops through our interactions with other people—we present ourselves to them and “come to know ourselves” by how they react to us. As a teenager, I know my identity was generated partially online. I’ve maintained an online relationship with my best friend, who lives on the other side of the country, for over a decade. I’ve laughed at and shared memes my parents couldn’t begin to understand—they bristle at “okay boomer.” I had my first email address in middle school—online communication is second nature to me and to my peers. I faced few significant issues completing assignments, peer reviewing papers, and watching video lectures online.

Nevertheless, I find my fellow liberal arts school students’ affinity for online learning concerning. I faced questions when I first chose Augustana as a high school senior and soon to be “undecided major”—why spend thousands of dollars to attend a small liberal arts college when I didn’t even know what career I aspired towards? My father went to a trade school and my mother a large state university for a very specific program, and neither exactly saw the appeal (though they were supportive). I didn’t even know what a liberal arts school was until I visited, but once I did, I was sold on the concept and it’s safe to say my college experience would not have had the same trajectory otherwise. Over the past four years I’ve tried new things and experimented widely—taking classes in geography, French, philosophy, and Muslim literature—before finally finding cultural anthropology. Online, I would have missed the irreplaceable chance hallway encounters and drop-in doorway conversations with my professors (during which I made many decisions about my education), the camaraderie of the cafeteria table, the clubs and organizations (like Lives of the Mind), the late nights, the field trips, the annual ritualistic rites of passage. There’s more to a college experience than efficiency, than acquiring credentials and receiving knowledge—young adults like me need four years with one another to grow as people and lifelong learners if we are to succeed in this rapidly changing world. Once the pandemic ends, one way or another, in-person residential college must continue if future students like me are to experience the rich, face-to-face education that I have at Augustana.

The Harvard Business Review authors, later in their article, cite a number of barriers to ending face-to-face learning for good. IT infrastructure does not currently exist at the scale necessary for widespread online learning, and video conference software can’t deliver the same “personalized experience” that face-to-face classes can. Furthermore, they admit, students can’t learn as efficiently online because of multi-tasking/attention span issues. Digital divides remain a problem too—online learning amplifies the gulf between rich and poor students, and faculty often aren’t prepared to teach with new technology online. This fall, as many schools plan to offer hybrid online/in-person programs, low-income students are predicted to fall behind. Despite these challenges online classes are, for now, the only safe option. Professors at my college, despite their passion for in-person teaching, have taken to Twitter recently to share their concerns about being forced by administrators to teach face-to-face in addition to online this fall. Donald Trump’s administration has pressured schools to reopen immediately. I care deeply about in-person education, but now is too soon.

Years ago, experts predicted “massive open online courses” would kill residential universities, yet face-to-face college education has “stood the test of time.” Following this pandemic and corresponding massive uptick in online education adoption (with teachers transforming their curriculums and new infrastructure being constructed), it seems likely that more colleges than ever will continue to offer online alternatives permanently. I agree with those who have argued, convincingly, that small institutions dedicated to deep relationships between faculty and students (think liberal arts schools) must continue post-pandemic, because online education misses “the human touch,” and “…those colleges that survive (with strong and supportive communities) will become more attractive as students will crave their focus on learning and the attention they give to each and every student.” For now, teachers can only do their best cultivate human connection online (even at the expense of course content, some have urged). Doubtless, regardless of how the pandemic plays out, the debate between commoditized online and slower, less “efficient” in-person education will continue. But as I’ve learned, a college community of consociated contemporaries cannot learn together, cannot grow older together, in the rich, deep way that students sharing a campus face-to-face can.

References:

Bakardjieva, Maria. 2014. “Social Media and the McDonaldization of Friendship.” De Gruyter Mouton.

Cooley, Charles H. 1902. Human Nature and the Social Order. NY: Scribner’s.

Locke, John L. 1998. Why We Don’t Talk to Each Other Anymore: The De-Voicing of Society. New York: Touchstone.

Schutz, Alred. 1967. The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. G. Walsh and F. Lehnert. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Turkle, Sherry. 2011. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. Basic Books.

Zhao, Shanyang. 2004. “Consociated Contemporaries as an Emergent Realm of the Lifeworld: Extending

Shutz’s Phenomenological Analysis to Cyberspace.” Human Studies 27: 91-105.

Zhao, Shanyang. 2005. “The Digital Self: Through the Looking Glass of Telecopresent Others.” Symbolic Interaction 28(3): 387-405.

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When the coronavirus epidemic response made us close campus, we switched to virtual school for the rest of the year. After their final International Baccalaureate exams were cancelled, my high school seniors taking IB Social and Cultural Anthropology decided they would like to do an auto-ethnography of their life in coronavirus quarantine. They collected data for three weeks (including photographs, screenshots of social media and virtual school, interviews, and personal reflections) and wrote anthropological analyses focused on different terms (communication, society, belonging, materiality, classification, the body, health, and conflict). I’m impressed and proud that they wanted to apply their anthropological knowledge and skills to the situation unfolding around them and provide data and interpretation that would be impossible to gather otherwise. They understood that in a context of nearly global quarantine, the only way to get ethnographic data on life in quarantine would be for anthropologists to collect it from their own experiences through auto-ethnography.

Assignment

Step 1: Write a 200-word narrative about your transition into quarantine, including specific details of who did or said what, when, where, and how exactly.

Step 2: Collect detailed data for three weeks, including photographs, screenshots of social media and virtual school, interviews, and personal reflections. Document how you get oral or written consent to use someone else’s words or image (of family and friends for example) or document how the data is presumed public (social media memes for example).

Step 3: Write an analysis of your data using anthropological concepts or theory to explain the bigger picture of what the data means in the human experience.

Step 4: Based on the quality of Step 3, I will organize students into blog teams and designate a team leader to coordinate a coherent theme for the blog. Everyone should ensure their section of the blog is proofread, has a visual, and has maintained the confidentiality of their participants.

As an anthropologist, I found a few things particularly interesting from my students’ data. Methodologically, I was challenged to reflect on the ethics of informed consent from such a personal data collection method as auto-ethnography and was proud that so many students realized the issues involved. Even when students asked for and received permission to record what they saw and heard, who can really give ‘informed consent’ to share subjective experience and perceptions? Even when students are collecting content on intentionally-shared and even public media, there is always the possibility the author wouldn’t want it shared beyond their intended audience. As a discipline, anthropology increasingly confronts such issues with the rising presence of digital social media in our lives. In my students’ data collection, all mentioned social media and I was challenged to reconsider the (lack of?) distinction between physical and virtual life, especially in the context of physical social distancing. Online workouts and online gaming, Facetime family events and online classes, Netflix parties and grocery store Snaps, consuming and sharing memes, listening to podcasts while making masks for others, were some of the moments of physical/virtual integration in my students’ lives over the three weeks of our project.

Teaching and learning through auto-ethnography was valuable in many ways. It is a very personal method and enabled students to understand and reflect on their own personal experiences in a way that is both subjective like a memoir but also resonating with universal human concepts. It enabled time-sensitive data collection in an unprecedented time of global pandemic and quarantine, providing rare and valuable insight that connects the local to the global. In conclusion, I strongly encourage anyone who is reading this blog to do an auto-ethnographic project and share it. Auto-ethnography is a particularly effective method, well-suited to the practice of social science in this unique global period, and a good way to help us understand ourselves and others.

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By Orli Katz, Leila Akinwumiju, Kayla Pointer, and Ameerah Turner

Welcome to our study of quarantine through the lens of change. Change in human culture is complex and can be both adaptive and maladaptive. We have observed the effects of the Coronavirus in relation to personal, religious, family and global changes.

Personal Change

Language is a resource for shaping identity and a change in language in quarantine was also observed. For example slang such as “the Q” and “the Qtine” as well as “The Ronies” have been observed in my household. Referring to serious matters with colloquial language and abbreviation can be a possible way for human culture to cope with change. However, humor as a mechanism in human culture may create conflict as well because under trying circumstances, humor can be viewed as inappropriate and inconsiderate to those fighting the virus. Language is a set of symbols used for communication. Identity is how one sees themselves and how others see them. Language use is often seen as a resource for shaping identity. So, people online or at home choose specific language to illustrate their teen identity or any other form.

I interviewed my parents about the changes they had to make because of Covid-19. I interviewed my dad first, in the morning. My father said he was very bored and misses work. He feels weird about being quarantined when he was not even a carrier of the virus. He talked about how he feels weird not doing anything, but on the plus side he now had time to fix his truck and clean his car. He was also making plans on how to do better at work once allowed to go back. My mom on the other hand still goes to work because her job is essential to the city of Memphis (For confidentiality reasons I will not be revealing her job), so she has had to go to work every day for the past three weeks. There was someone at her job who possibly was infected so she could not go to work for that day. She was happy for the day off, but she said things changed ever since that incident. Now at work they have to wear masks inside and outside of their offices and they must stay six feet apart from others in the building. My mom said that they have a new weekly schedule where they only go to work for three days and the other two days they work from home. She said that she is happy for that arrangement because she feels safer. Every day when she gets home, she must wash her hands and change her clothes and put the dirty ones in the washer.

Family Changes

As a result of the pandemic, I’ve been able to spend more time with my family and it’s been quite enjoyable. Spending more time with my family has become increasingly more important, as maintain human connection in a small quarantine space is absolutely vital. My mother and I have been cooking meals together- specifically rice and chicken stew, seasoned steak and vegetables and English Breakfast Tea. Sunday Afternoon, around 5pm, I helped my mom prepare the steak dinner. I peeled potatoes, chopped bell peppers, stirred the food in the pan, and seasoned the steak. I also helped with clean up, making sure the surfaces were clean and garbage was thrown away.

My mom and I watched episode 1 of Netflix Documentary Don’t F**K With Cats on Tuesday around 7 o’clock. The first episode describes the life of Deanna Thompson’s internet sleuth skills and her life backstory, essentially laying the foundation for how she caught a global serial killer a year before police. Through participant observation, I observed the series itself and made casual conversation with my mom regarding life events and events happening within the series. This is a change because we would normally not have time to spend together like this.

On Sunday, I ventured out to the grocery store Kroger with my father and brother to get essentials like bagels, milk, eggs, Pirates Booty, and a variety of other snacks. While waiting for my dad to grab something, I took a picture and added the words “Weekend Vibes” to share with others.

I’ve been going on daily walks with my family as we try to remain somewhat active throughout quarantine! Myself, my brother and my father simply walked around our neighborhood for around 45 minutes. We chatted, remarked on houses we’d never seen before and took in some fresh air.

My data collection method was participant observation, which has the advantage of including detailed emic (insider) perspective and interactions but also the disadvantages that go with remembering. My memories are personal and may not represent how the other members in my family see the events.

Changes with Friends

I’ve been making a lot of TikToks myself! I noticed that my sleep schedule has also been more dysfunctional than normal, I’ve been staying up closer to 2-3 AM. I’ve found TikToks help me maintain a sense of humor, especially since current events and Memphis in general have been seeming rather bleak. The data was collected within my bedroom in various spots. I would make some TikToks in my bathroom, as the lighting was better. Sometimes, I would make them on my bed specifically for comfort reasons. Ocassionally, I would move around for a TikTok or sit at my desk. All the TikToks were made in the wee hours of the morning (2-3 AM).

One silver lining to quarantine is I’ve been able to get to know my classmates a lot better, especially as we’re getting ready to go to college! I’ve been able to make a lot of friends that I’ll hopefully be able to see in August. We’ve been facetiming and zooming a lot! In this particular image, a friend was wearing a bucket hat and we decided to all join in! One friend didn’t have a hat, so she gleefully improvised (with a ukulele)!

Globalization and Language Change

Globalization, the continuous increasing interconnectedness of nations, cultures, economies, and politics, is crucial to understanding pandemic ethnographic data since globalization is part of what led to the pandemic. With the connection of people across countries and the rapid movement and travel, disease spreads quickly creating change in all cultures. These changes can create conflict as disease can become associated with specific cultures. Some people began falsely referring to the coronavirus as the Chinese virus. This could be considered maladaptive cultural changes.

However, globalization increased through technology as a result of quarantine. For example, my family is scattered across the country; we have members in California, New York, New Jersey, Tennessee, Massachusetts, and D.C. However, on Passover we were able to celebrate as together as possible through the use of zoom, a platform that allows for group video chats. Here we can see how culture is adaptive under rapidly changing communities.

Ethics of Data Collection

The ethics that go into collecting research relate to the safety and security of the participants. Informed consent is very important because it gives the permission of participation in the collection of data. Privacy and confidentiality are a human right that could be taken away with sharing the participants information, also it could be potentially dangerous in the public safety of the participants. I obtained oral consent from my family by openly explaining the project and asking for their permission to observe and record their everyday life. In this time of coronavirus pandemic, physical ethnographic observation outside of the home can create risk. Instead, we gathered auto-ethnographic data from observing and interviewing our own friends and family at home and virtually.

In one author’s house there are small children, teens, a young adult, and two adults so there is a lot of conflict that is experienced in the house. The ethical considerations with collecting data for minors causes me as the researcher to ask for parental consent which is similar to informed consent. It is also important to protect the privacy of my family so they would be safe, so information would have to be kept confidential. One author’s observations of tik tok behavior does not include the consent of the content creators. However, they already post this content on a public platform therefore, it can be assumed they are okay with people seeing and sharing it. The danger of human culture in times of pandemic can be observed at grocery stores as it is the only essential outing that people can engage in. People are observed to wear masks, wipe down grocery carts, wear gloves and purposefully avoid one another. However, being in a public place can potentially spread the virus and create a dangerous environment at home as well. Furthermore, the danger of the situation is worse for medical workers. One author’s father is a surgeon and must face the danger of the virus each day in a hospital.

Whenever possible, we avoided covert research to protect the privacy of our participants because it affects the security of the participants as well as the involvement of illegal acts within the culture. If the researcher is participating in illegal or unethical acts, it compromises them as well as the participants of the culture being studied. All of these ethical issues importantly contribute to our ethical considerations.

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By Yagmur Onder, Shivani Koka, and Steven Gao

During these unprecedented times, we have sought mental, physical, and social health in a variety of ways. We documented our time in quarantine, collecting data through participant observation, unstructured interviews, and photography. Our auto-ethnographic data illustrates the importance of ritual and kinship to our individual and family health. Having a place of belonging and classifying with our kin shapes identity through shared memories of being required to perform all activities at home.

Home Workouts

On April 6th, in the late afternoon, I went on a walk through nearby neighborhoods with family member DO. We discussed the extremes we observed since beginning self-quarantine and the largest shift, regardless of any individual’s position, seems to be the break in routines: Healthcare workers prioritize COVID-19 patients; teachers prepare online lectures and activities; coaches lead workouts over video chatting; athletes suspend their traditional practices and substitute them with home workouts; and so many other schedules flipped upside down.

With this time, DO prioritized bettering her mental and physical health by changing her routine in order to sleep healthier hours and working out more. She feels this quarantine has shaped her for the better because it’s taught her how to motivate herself at her own pace and schedule. One way she believes this period has been influential for her is understanding the “mindset that you’re not changing something about yourself, you are kind of making a lifestyle”. Her cultural habits seem to have altered towards a healthier direction, something she wants to continue when COVID-19 cases have plateaued and decreased, and it’s a healthy habit I’m working on as well.

Social Distancing Routines

At the beginning of my family’s 4th week in quarantine, I wanted to observe my family’s actions and conduct unstructured interviews about kinship. Kinship, or family, is a system of how people are related to each other. Today, I observed my family doing a puzzle after we all ate breakfast and sat down with our coffee. I noticed that my family is in a better mood due to less stress and more time at home. We are getting along much better because we are bonding more. Activities like cooking, going on walks, yoga, and movies have elevated our moods. Kinship is one of the most important, universal, and complex social organizations into which humans organize themselves. Often seen as central to the stable foundation of society, kinship and family relationships strongly affect your individual identity. Through observing my own family during quarantine, I have noticed the emotional support that it has provided me. My family gives me a place of belonging and shapes how I develop, personally feeling the most stable and simple way of organizing society.

With this time I have also focused on observing myself. I used my own memories as a form of collecting data. I have memories of my daily ritual before quarantine. Rituals are symbolic actions that help people physically express their beliefs, values, and cultural identity. I would wake up, go to school, go to lacrosse practice, do homework, then go to sleep. Now my daily ritual has changed drastically. I wake up late, do a couple hours of school, workout in my backyard, and then watch Netflix. This drastic change in ritual has also affected how I see my identity. My previous ritual gave me balance and purpose. I felt that a big part of my identity was the ritual I go through. Today I noticed myself longing for my old ritual to keep my sanity.

Rituals and routines function to provide a sense of comfort in the human experience. Rituals are stylized, usually repetitive acts that take place at a set time and location. They can contribute towards the affirmation of our identities through a certain performance. For example, DO’s routine of specialized workouts in addition to the transition from traditional to virtual learning, establishes her sense of self and belonging as the place in which her identity is largely influenced as a teenager (her high school) has changed to her bedroom. Malinowski (Pountney and Maric 167) explains that rituals can have a psychotherapeutic quality. Understood in that way, rituals may bring comfort and reassurance in this time of a global crisis, especially for the youth who are unaccustomed to completing their school work at their own schedules. My school shifted all plans from campus to virtual software.

There is always disagreement within cultures, however, and some individuals resist self-quarantine and continue their normal pre-COVID-19 routines, such as the people I’ve observed in the news protesting the self-quarantine. These disagreements by people of different backgrounds unite in feelings of powerlessness and tension in the bubble of self-quarantine in which the rituals are a symbolic source of comfort.

Gaming During Quarantine 

Under the current situation, many people in quarantine and home all day like me play a lot of multi-player online video games, such as Call of Duty, CSGO, and Fortnite. Like me, the majority of students across the globe are attending class online and some play video games afterwards for hours. I generally play at least three hours a day. However, the increased time spent playing video games could be considered good and bad for your mental health. The good benefits entail increased brain activity and emotional connection and comfort. The negative consequences entail sitting at home and a lack of motion.

So, despite my limited space, I do plenty of at-home exercises to keep mentally and physically active. I found that video games positively enhance my mental well-being: My favorite daily moments are derived from interactions with other gamers. As our world shifts from traditional social interactions to virtual, it becomes more significance to understand how video games may influence our mental health.

Ethical Evaluations

The primary role of the anthropologist is to accurately share their understanding of the human experience without putting individuals at risk in terms of their privacy and safety. My interviews (verbal consent given) represents only the individual perspective on the quarantine experience, not necessarily representative of the broader population. I realize that my position (social, economic, and geographic) affects my opinion of quarantine because of what’s discussed around me. Because of this, I talk to friends across the United States and even family in Turkey to understand how they’re dealing with self-quarantine. The data from my family members restricts my ability to generalize towards the larger population because my family consists are two health-care workers and a twin sister who live comfortably: I’m not in direct access with individuals that may be suffering from self-quarantine and my understanding of psychotherapeutic comfort in rituals during this time could be enhanced by observing what families of different positions are doing during this time. However, analysis of my auto-ethnographic data in terms of ritual and kinship connect these individual experiences with broader themes in anthropology.

During my observation of my family members during these unprecedented times, I considered many ethical issues. One of the main issues is consent of the participants.

My goal was to be able to observe my participants without doing any harm. I received verbal consent from all family members. An advantage of auto-ethnographic observation is that it has no or very low cost since I have been observing inside my home. It also is practical due to no travel and having time because school is now online. Though our data may not be representative of the whole population, it does present the situation for our specific families. To make final conclusions, more research will have to be done. However, given the breadth of all who are affected by COVID-19 and the logistics of quarantine, this kind of auto-ethnographic random sampling could be the only kind of data we have.

Conclusion

As COVID-19 has been spreading across the globe, each person has to take a step forward and be responsible of their health as well as others. I think you should wash your hands every time when you leave or enter the house. Make sure you wipe the door handle and use all other precautionary methods to keep yourself away from the virus. For example, I would wash my hands after working out on the treadmill, making sure to apply the hand soap at least twice. I’m personally a clean person, so when it comes to self-precaution, I try to make everything perfect. Everyday morning and night, I would take a shower to make sure that I’m clean and ready to go. After each meal, I will for sure to wash my hands several time and keep it as clean as I possible could. I know that hands are the easiest tool that can possibly transfer things onto your body. Just by doing all these things, makes me feel safe and clean. And not just that, I also do feel that I’m doing all these things to help others as well, because the more precautions I do the less risk there will be. So, it makes me feel better and more positive under the current situation.

Here are the steps of preventing the spread of the coronavirus and taking up the responsibility to maintain self-hygiene:

Clean your hands often. Use soap and water, or an alcohol-based hand rub.

Maintain a safe distance from anyone who is coughing or sneezing.

Don’t touch your eyes, nose or mouth.

Cover your nose and mouth with your bent elbow or a tissue when you cough or sneeze.

Stay home if you feel unwell.

If you have a fever, a cough, and difficulty breathing, seek medical attention. Call in advance.

Photo by Author.

Sources

Pountney, Laura, and Marić Tomislav. Introducing Anthropology. Polity Press, 2015.

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By Phillip Kulubya, Daniel Baymiller, and Bryant Haley

Re-classifying the High School Senior Experience

For my peers and I, the coronavirus has deprived us of many things like a normal prom, high school sports seasons, and the IB exams which we have spent the whole school year preparing for. The cancellation of the IB exams affected our classes dramatically, especially Anthropology where we had been practicing constantly. Despite the surprising news, the exams’ cancellation has been overshadowed by the many changes that the coronavirus has created for us. We have had to get used to using online school tools like Microsoft Teams and Webex while dealing with the possibility of not being able to have a normal graduation. With our anthropology internal assessments done and no exams to study for anymore, we needed some other way to apply our knowledge of anthropology. This auto-ethnographic project has given us the ability to analyze the changes that have been made to our lives as well as the lives of our friends and family. The quarantine has forced us to either interview those in our direct vicinity or use technology to interview those who we can’t see in person. We have learned about how they feel about the quarantine as well the measures that they have taken concerning the spread of the coronavirus. Even though everyone has reacted to this quarantine in their own ways, I think that this ethnography shows our shared nervousness concerning both the present and the future. Classification has been extremely relevant to our ethnography because it has become apparent that the coronavirus has affected the places that we can visit as well as the ways that we are expected to conduct ourselves around other people.

Where can we go?

 On Monday April 6th 2020, I asked my family member, Mrs. K, one question related to the quarantine and pandemic. My question was, “can you explain your situation with Apple yesterday and how it has been affected by the current Coronavirus pandemic and quarantine?” I asked the questions in the room of Mrs. K. I used the Voice Memo app on my iPhone to record my questions and Mrs. K’s answers. Before doing this, I asked Mrs. K whether I could ask her a question for my anthropology class ethnography on the quarantine. I also asked her whether I could record the audio and use it for the ethnography. In response to my question, Mrs. K had told me that her phone had died. Mrs. K would have normally gone to the Apple store for help, but Apple Stores are closed due to quarantine. Mrs. K called Apple Care and worked with them for an hour to test the phone battery on Sunday. This did not work.  The Apple employees made an appointment for Mrs.K with a repair person. Mrs.K decided that she would get a new battery, and then she would transfer her information to a new iPhone 11. In Introducing anthropology, a commodity is defined as “anything that can be bought or sold” (Pountney and Marić 2015: pg. 270).  Due to the quarantine, it is becoming difficult for people to quickly buy things that they really need. Commodities have become harder for us to get because many places are closed and places like Apple are classified as non- essential. Even though Apple is not seen as essential and its closing makes sense, it is still a devastating thing because how important technology is to communication right now. If the quarantine was not happening, Mrs.K could have driven 5 to 10 minutes to the Apple store near us and bought a new phone.

On Tuesday April 7th, 2020, my question for Mrs.K was, “can you list and explain the ways that you have changed your behavior or actions due to the Coronavirus pandemic and the quarantine”? I did the exact same things that I did on Monday. In Introducing anthropology, classification is defined as, “a system of organization of people, places, and things shared by all humans in different ways in different cultures” (Pountney and Marić 2015: pg. 69).  Considering that many places are closed, it seems that there is a new classification system concerning where people can and cannot go. Our homes are now categorized as the best places to be. “People divide up the world into categories which are specific to their place and context” (Pountney and Marić 2015: pg. 52). Based on Mrs. K’s response, it seems that she has created her own classification system during this pandemic. I think that this classification system is used to determine which places are absolutely essential to her and which places she can currently live without. I think that it is also used to determine which places are extremely dangerous to her health. For example, she will not go to Kroger or the hairdresser anymore. She is fine with going to the bank. People now classify each other as health threats. This is shown by the fact that Mrs. K only goes to the bank at night because there are less people there at that time. This is also shown by the fact that Mrs. K wears gloves when she does transactions with other people in public.

The physical and social aspects of social distancing

From Monday April 6th to Thursday April 9th, I observed the quarantine culture of the S household. On Monday, I went on a walk with the mother of the household for around 25-30 minutes in the middle of the afternoon. During the walk, she explained to me that she was wearing a protective mask so that I am protected.  At one point in the walk, Ms. S and I spotted one of her neighbors in her front yard. As we got closer to our neighbor’s house, Ms. S started talking to her, complementing the Easter decorations in her front yard. I observed that during this conversation (using participant observation), our neighbor looked uncomfortable seeing Ms. S with the mask. Though, after Ms. S assured her that she was wearing it mostly for my sake, I saw that the neighbor seemed more comfortable. Here, participant observation can be defined as when a researcher participates in an observed culture. Through my analysis, this situation adequately represents the concept of boundary in both social and literal terms. As defined, boundary is the physical and/or imagined difference(s) between groups and individuals. The imagined boundary between Ms. S and I and the neighbor was observable through how, as I saw it, the neighbor was initially apprehensive to talk to us. Through our conversation, that boundary slowly eroded. However, the physical boundary between us all was maintained throughout our interaction. The boundary between Ms. S and I and her neighbor, by extension, represents a universal human trait: classification. Defined, classification refers to the method by which individuals use to characterize and understand the world around them.

How have others been affected by the changes?

For my data collection, I utilized unstructured interviews and I interviewed one of my parents and one of my friends as well. I gained their consent beforehand, and told them I would be using their data. The questions I asked were: “What do you think about the lockdown situation forced by the virus?” and “How will most if not all societies be affected by the outbreak?” My parents answer was: “The situation is unprecedented, I haven’t been through anything like this before and this will be something that you remember for the rest of your life”. The answer to the second question was “I think that they way everyone interacts with each other will be changed forever, everyone will have the memory of when they couldn’t touch anyone over fears of a virus”. For my friend, their answer to the first question was “This virus thing is crazy, I’m most upset over losing the best part of our senior year”. Their answer to the second question was, “I feel like people will be more hygienic, maybe regulations will change to be more sanitary somehow”.

Following the universal of how cultures change over time, this particular change happened extremely sudden, causing many people and societies to be forced to adapt quickly to a new life centered around the internet and work from home. This quick change messes up the daily rituals performed by people. Two theories of rituals are from Durkheim – in which ritual is a means to create social bonds and maintain social and moral order or social integration – and Malinowski – in which rituals help control emotions and are important because of psychotherapeutic quality (Pountney and Maric 2015, pg. 167). I myself have felt a loss of order, I feel as if my daily rituals have been disrupted and I am out of sync. The rituals performed to maintain social order are no longer occurring.

Memes

Through the application of classification, many young leftists on social media have created memes representing the economic responses by the status quo to the Coronavirus. Through the memes, an observer of young, leftist culture can comprehend how these leftists have derived social memory to “poke fun” at the current situation. This Avengers-themed meme, posted by “DLM” and seen by the author, represents this understanding.

Another meme, demonstrating shared knowledge and interpretation of the economic status quo, pokes fun of the argument that the stock market should be prioritized, by referring to it as “big line.”

An observer of the meme culture can further understand that between the economic status-quo and the young leftists, there is a great power asymmetry, and that the memes are microcosm that demonstrate the rejection of the free-market, capitalist hegemony. I observe that memes rely on shared political and economic classifications of the experience of coronavirus pandemic and quarantine.

Conclusion

From the proliferation of gloves and masks to the closing of Apple Stores, it is apparent that the coronavirus has altered what we consider to be safe and normal behavior.  It now seems that activities like visiting a bank or talking to a neighbor have become awkward or harder to do. Outside of the people that we live with, in-person interactions have been somewhat marred by the coronavirus. We either have to avoid other people or be careful when we are around other people. As a society, all we can do is follow the new rules that we have created for ourselves. Hopefully we will soon be able to return to a world where graduations or proms are not considered to be hazardous events.

Bibliography:

Pountney, L. and Marić, T. (2015). Introducing anthropology. Polity Press.

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By: Ambria Williams, Tevy Byrd, Jade Sublett, and Robert Jungklas

Introduction

The coronavirus has made a large impact on the entire world. As seniors in high school, we have investigated how the coronavirus has impacted students around the world and how social media and the news have shaped our lives. Throughout our investigation, we focused on how COVID-19 and general health has changed the way people communicate and how identities have been established through language, rituals, and kinship. Each student demonstrates how coronavirus has impacted their lives through participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and visual anthropology. As the picture below indicates, whether through social media or spending quality time with family, we have each discovered our own way to establish a positive and motivating lifestyle during the pandemic.

Social media can help keep people connected

I heavily rely on social media during the pandemic as it helps me feel a shared connection and identity with others. Identity can be defined as being one with a certain group. Group identity can be interpreted, created, and maintained by an individual through agency (the capacity of a person to make their own choices). For example, I feel as if I share a group identity with the class of 2020 as we have the shared experience of not having a normal end to our high school careers. Social memory is one resource that can shape identity and I have been able to witness social memory unfolding before me on social media. One day rainy afternoon as I was flipping through my social media, I saw a message to the class of 2020 that brightened my rainy day. The message made me realize that I identify with a group of students who have lived through historical events such as the coronavirus pandemic. As such, the shared experiences of being quarantined at home, having online schooling, having to miss prom and other iconic high school events, as well as having to witness a  global pandemic has created a social and shared memory amongst students and the class of 2020, therefore forming a unique group of students who I relate to and identify. Even though I have missed out on some iconic high school experiences, I realized through social media that I am not alone and that I am extremely grateful for what I have during this time of unrest.

Another resource that has been used to shape my identity during the coronavirus is language. In terms of the data I collected, my experience during the pandemic has primarily consisted of nonverbal communication on my computer and telephone in the form of written language. Written language can be defined as communication through impressions and symbols. Language is universal and is essential for the survival of the human species as it allows for knowledge to be transferred between groups of people and generations. Without the language used to communicate the memes and news posts regarding the coronavirus, I would not be able to understand what is happening in the world or understand the cultural contexts behind the humor in the memes that make me smile during such a tragic and difficult time. For example, one day I was scrolling on my socials and saw a coronavirus meme with a superhero. I smiled because I understood the cultural reference of the meme and how it relates to social distancing. The language used in the meme also made the meme more humorous. The Dr. Manhattan meme below utilizes nonverbal language by bolding the word “no”, further emphasizing how important social distancing is by utilizing an iconic DC character in the message. Essentially, the meme made me happy during an unpleasant time, which helped me feel more reassured that I will persevere despite social distancing.

Bringing positive vibes through family time

Being with my family during this pandemic has brought us even closer together than ever before. Before, my parents were always working, and I was always at school or either out with my friends. As a result of the novel time together, we were able to establish better kinship social relationships, an important part of the lives of all humans in all societies. Being with my family has helped me mentally. Being around their positive energy has given me a new thought on life and to not take anything for granted. I feel my mental health has grown stronger because I have been able to focus on myself and also having my family here to help me reach my goals. For example, exercising with my mom has become our daily ritual activity. Ritual can be defined as actions with intentional symbolic meaning undertaken for a specific cultural purpose, such as a rite of passage from childhood to adulthood. We use these rituals to help our bodies physically to stay in shape and keep us healthy. We have also instituted a ritual family game night every Tuesday where we play UNO. My mom is very competitive when it comes to playing games and so am I. We will play against each other for at least two hours just laughing and having fun.

 Staying connected and active

 While there have been many positive physical and social impacts of social distancing, it has also had some negative impacts. For my research, I talked to three of my friends from different states about quarantine via Discord and found that while all of us had different school situations- one homeschooled, one graduated, one a junior in high school, and me, a high school senior- all of us felt the emotional impacts having our daily rituals disrupted by quarantine. I felt stress and worry on a personal level, and also felt empathetic towards my friends struggling with their own emotional health and sleep schedules. However, spending more time at home also gave me the opportunity to take up new hobbies that support my emotional and physical health.

Despite the term “social” distancing, social relations are as strong as ever. My friends and I talk about how our days are going online and “hang out” through video games like Animal Crossing, and I take the time to go on bike rides around the block with my sister and chat in the afternoon. While many social interactions rely on physical place and space, people are finding ways to construct digital places and spaces to stay connected.

Staying positive and helping your community

At the beginning of April my mom told me about a group of local men and women making mask covers as per request of hospital workers. The making of these masks is a quite intricate and involved process, but they are a necessary commodity during this time. The mask covers can be washed and reused and are implemented to extend the life of the medical masks that go underneath. First, I cut out the interior layer of the masks from a pattern in our living room. Then my mom sews the front layer of a more decorative fabric to the inner lining. Either side of the mask needs to have a slot for the elastic to be threaded through, which I do as the final step. Me and my mom have been listening to a variety of podcasts during this time and it has really served as a bonding experience more than anything, especially since I’m about to go off to college.

These masks and hand made mask covers provide a perfect example of material culture and interconnectedness in how an event can turn an average object into a universal symbol. Clothing is important material culture for our bodies. Material culture is the concept that we as humans have cultures and rituals that revolve around material objects. This can be seen in “mask culture”. Doctors will always wear masks when dealing with contagious patients, as to not contract whatever contagious affliction their patient has. This establishes a very unidirectional line of thinking with a mask. You wear the mask to not get sick, and that is all it is. However, what the pandemic has brought to light is all the hidden elements of a mask that no one ever thinks about. Masks are a finite resource. They are more important than ever and doctors are no longer the only people that need to wear them on a regular basis.

Amongst all this turmoil and uncertainty, it is important to actively seek out the positive sides of the pandemic. Not only to remain calm and support your mental health but also to learn how others are helping make a difference and how you can too. I think growing up, maybe more in our generation than others, there is a huge emphasis on the idea that not caring about something is “cool”. The more nonchalant or unaffected a character appeared in a TV show or movie, the “cooler” they were. This could be attributed to typical teenage angst and the general concept of counterculture, along with an entire section of the media being aimed at children for the first time in history. This glorification of moody teenagers doing whatever they wanted ingrained a certain pattern of thinking into an entire generation of kids. However one of the most important parts about growing is realizing that caring about something is not only “cool”, it’s most people’s reason to live. Finding a passion can grant you a lifetime of fulfillment. And the pandemic has shown me that if you care about something enough, you can make truly wonderful things happen.

Conclusion 

Despite the abrupt negative changes in everyone’s lives due to the pandemic, there are ways in which to ensure that everyone maintains a healthy mind and body. During unprecedented times, it is valuable to know that connecting with other people can help keep the body motivated. For the body is symbolic, and bodily practices can indicate meanings to the grander society. Whether through social media connections or by playing a card game with family, social interactions are key for keeping the body social. Mary Douglas’s theory of social bodies points to why being social is important during quarantine. The theory states that the physical body is symbolic of a person’s role in society, and that society attempts to control the physical body. During a deadly pandemic, it is important to understand that physically distancing oneself from others can help mitigate the deadly effects. Through the news and social media, people are urging others to physically distance themselves. However, just because one is physically distant, does not mean that they must be socially distant as well. By being open, talking, and helping others during quarantine, people can establish a healthy mind and body during stressful times.

References

Douglas, Mary. (1996, December 4). Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology. Retrieved April 23, 2020, from                                                                                        https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/330384.Natural_Symbols

Pountney, Laura, and Tomislav Marić. Introducing Anthropology: What Makes Us Human?,Polity Press, 2015.

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By Trip Magdovitz, Bobbie Burnham, and Ibrahim Farooq, Class of 2020

During our time in quarantine, the excess time available to us, as both school and extracurricular activities change and stop altogether, gives more time to collect our thoughts. Sometimes, however, we find ourselves wondering about the outside world as well as take a closer look at our own lives and combine it with our understanding of anthropology to sharpen our anthropological skills.

Employment Through Boundaries

Unemployment rates and wage cuts for essential workers due to the absence of people interacting with companies and other individuals have skyrocketed over the course of the spread of the Coronavirus. Buildings once lively and full of workers now stand empty and many of their former employees without a source of income. I do not speak from personal experience when it comes to unemployment, but I have friends as well as family that are unable to work directly after the quarantine both because their employers couldn’t afford to keep paying them or the business was too slow. One member of my family is an essential worker, being a physician. Two weeks after the quarantine began, my family member was still working as and could still make an income. However, after a couple of days, she began to discuss with others in the family about how she as well as everyone else was having their wages cut in half due to the falling economy. Economic production is going downhill quickly due to both formal and informal boundaries established by either legislature or the fear of contracting and/or spreading the Coronavirus.

Boundaries can be defined as the furthest extent of something, which can be physical or imagined, and most boundaries have both physical and imagined aspects. In this case, my interpretation of the effect that Coronavirus has had on economic production is through the lens of formally and informally set and maintained boundaries. A formal boundary is one that is set and maintained through legislative processes such as the stay at home order, and an informal boundary is one that is set and maintained by those without recognized power of enforcement. Along with our city shutting down, many cities and even country governments gave a stay at home order, which attempts to make residents stay separated from each other to prevent the spread of Coronavirus. Physically, people are separated, and there is official documentation of legislative orders, but people are also separated emotionally and intangibly. In an informal manner, people are oftentimes taking it into their own hands to enforce their own rules. While browsing Snapchat, I came across an article in which a couple in India was harassed and ordered to leave a shop because they were not wearing face masks. Even in homes themselves, if parents still work and may be exposed, they establish harsh rules and even isolate themselves from the family because of these new boundaries. This is both an example of how formal and informal boundaries can clash and how the fear of Coronavirus, which is possibly a show of Mary Douglas’s theory of Purity and Danger, is affecting global economic production. When people are no longer spending time in stores or at doctor’s offices because of fear and legislation, these businesses can no longer support themselves or their employees and must cut back wages and spending. This reminded me of the theory of Purity and Danger, established through Mary Douglas’s ethnography, “Purity and Danger” in 1966, describes how people can have a fear of encroaching boundaries because what is within a boundary is considered “pure” and what is outside of that boundary is considered “dangerous” or “dirty”. In the case of Coronavirus, people are so afraid of becoming afflicted that many create their own rules to stay even more isolated than legislative presences order. Coronavirus is associated with any encroaching boundary, including the ideas and presences of other people, forcing people to stop interacting with the people and businesses with which they would normally interact.

Economic Production

Looking on the news daily, it is clear that society as well as the material culture has changed drastically due to the virus. When I first started looking up information and searching through the news, everyone was in a panic. My friends and even distant family were forced to stop coming to work in order to follow the stay at home order. However, many of these people live paycheck to paycheck and so need to be able to work to maintain themselves. Only those that are considered essential workers are able to stay up and running. The unique situation present in society right now is that the idea of what is essential and what is not as well as how people will survive in a society focused on the material culture of money. The problem is that most people cannot work, especially large factory workers who produce products that are not deemed necessary by society. Products such as cars and airplanes are not able to be sold and produced to meet a non-existent need for them. With most people unable to afford a commodity such as a car or already have one, there is little reason to be car shopping during the pandemic. With this, the economy plummets as people lose jobs, companies lose money, and the gross domestic profit of the country drops drastically.

Considering money, there are still necessities to buy and people with money to spend even during the pandemic. However, how they use their money varies greatly depending on their ideas of materiality. This matters because after having found an article about what is known as “panic buying” we grew very interested in the materiality behind the pandemic and how it has been affected. As I was sitting at home in my kitchen on March 26, my parents rushed into the side door as fast as they could carrying as many grocery bags as I thought humanly possible. They told my siblings and I to go help unload everything they had bought, and only after having walked back and forth between the car and the fridge did I question the amount of food we had bought. I asked my parents about this, all I got was a shrugging shoulder from one and a short response from another. They said that they bought so much food to stock up for the quarantine, while everything else was “because everyone else was doing it”. This particular statement of a sort of herd mentality piqued my interest. Thus, I dove into trying to understand what this sort of event was called and how it happens. That’s when I found the article on panic buying a week into the stay at home order for my area. In it, I found that Panic buying is the idea of buying to give the illusion of control of the situation. However, when the stocks of food and water were running low and were not available, people began panic buying other materials. One particular object that really caught my attention was the overbuying of toilet paper. I found this part out as I wandered about on social media. Many people who have heard of the toilet paper event have begun to make jokes about it. Using sarcasm to portray their confusion and to point out the flaws in buying so much. People even go so far as to humorously use toilet paper as a currency. Which very much points out the changes in material culture around the world.

The origin behind this economic struggle stems from the change in material culture that causes a massive domino effect in that people lose their jobs that surround a seemingly irrelevant industry. Thus, they cannot further provide the necessities such as food, water, and housing. Following Janet Hoskins’ (1998) ideas, she argues that objects are given biographical significance entangled in different aspects of society such as a sense of self and identity. Before the Pandemic, a car was considered a necessity in some cultures and was a highly valued object. After the events following the discovery of COVID-19, that necessity has shifted to almost irrelevancy as objects deemed more important such as hand sanitizer and food take much higher precedence over an automobile. This growing need does not always follow the same social construction, however, as some objects such as toilet paper have also gained importance much to the confusion of society. This change in material culture stems from the idea of panic buying.

Digital and Changing Materiality

Are digital objects material? Interpersonal communication takes place in a digital place and space, with its own set of rules and relationships. Digital-material online meeting spaces are used to organize and shape cultures. Certain cultures, such as those in relation to schools or workplaces, have experienced a kind of diaspora- the mass involuntary dispersal of a population from a center to multiple areas- due to the coronavirus. In response, those cultures have migrated- or moved from one locality to another- to online meeting spaces. Even schools like mine migrated to online meeting spaces to try and keep the classroom feeling. Which then caused a need for microphones if our computers did not have them and headphones so that our families didn’t always have to hear our classes. Because of the change in scenery, students and adults alike had to change their work space as well as their work supplies. Offices turned into living rooms, and classrooms turned into bedrooms. The regular school supplies we usually used were now replaced with electronic copies of everything as our entire school life shifted entirely to digital. We asked students just like us about their experiences and each one gave their part. Some said that school was a lot less difficult and easier to manage because they needed less material and supplies to do their work and could do so without even leaving their home. Others complained that their computers and electronics could not keep up with the growing emphasis on technology and resorted to using phones or apple products rather than their computers to be in classes. No matter who we asked, however, everything could be connected or even explained by the changing material culture.

Material culture examines how “things” have meaning, where social reality is grounded in objects. In digital space, physical objects are shown through the unique framing of a person’s digital camera. Material objects relating to technology shapes these interactions. This includes microphones, cameras, processors, memory storage, and more. These physical objects are all key to the ways that digital expression is possible. For example, on the online meeting platform Zoom, two kinds of material objects have an impact on how symbolic expression is possible, with a green-screen effect that we can use to have a physical green-screen run a green-screen effect without a physical green-screen. Alone, these material objects have little meaning. However, in the digital context and space of Zoom, they gain new meaning as objects through which we are told how people think about the world around them and about culture and people’s lives. These objects are tools that take on meaning when used and are also shaped by human action. When virtual ‘objects’ are shared via online mediums, they are symbolic of the meanings given to them through the broader culture of those who share and receive it.

The material objects that surround using newly popular online meeting platforms have shifted in value immensely as the need for them rose exponentially. This linear relationship between digitally focused material objects and their value can be explained thoroughly by Arjun Appadurai’s (1986) interpretivist approach. He argues that objects are given their value by the people that use it and how they are circulated in society. By applying that, we understand that material cultures surrounding currency or valuables such as jewelry are based upon the interpretation of their value and are maintained by the social acceptance of that value. The same can be said about digitally focused materials such as an electronic display and a microphone. Due to the global pandemic, objects such as these are in increased demand and popularity.

Many of us would have never thought that a virus could do so much, changing our ways of thinking about money and material culture alike. With the idea that cultures will always change over time, it is clear that even our understanding of materiality as well as what is important can change drastically. From the new-found importance of toilet paper to the irrelevance of cars now, the materiality behind our society as well as the production that is driven by this materiality has all changed for better or for worse.

Bibliography:

Appadurai, Arjun. The Social Life of Things. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Cox, Jeff. “ Coronavirus Job Losses Could Total 47 Million, Unemployment Rate May Hit 32 Percent, Fed Estimates.” NBC News, 30 Mar. 2020, www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/coronavirus-job-losses-could-total-47-million-unemployment-rate-may-n1172111.

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. New York: Praeger, 1966. Print.

Hoskins, Janet. Agency, Biography and Objects. London: Sage, 1998.

Jones, Lora. “Coronavirus: What’s Behind the Great Toilet Paper Grab?” BBC News, 26 Mar. 2020, www.bbc.com/news/business-52040532.

Koenig, Bill. “Manufacturing in the Middle of COVID-19 Pandemic.” SME Media, 18 Mar. 2020, www.sme.org/technologies/articles/2020/march/manufacturing-in-the-middle-of-covid-19-pandemic/.

O’Flaherty, Kate. “Zoom’s 200 Million Users Are Facing A Serious New Threat.” Forbes, 20 Apr. 2020, www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahertyuk/2020/04/20/zooms-200-million-users-are-facing-a-new-threat-heres-what-to-do/#4f914d42b83d.

Pountney, Laura & Tomislav Maric. “Introducing Anthropology”. Polity Press, 2015.

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