COVID-19's Impact on Social Connection

When the pandemic forced society into a massive experiment with technologically mediated interaction, we told ourselves it was temporary.

Through a systematic analysis of public health campaigns from 2020 to 2022, I traced how COVID-19 accelerated the adoption of digital mediation technologies by framing them as essential protective measures. Yet this narrative obscured a fundamental transformation in how we structure our relationships with other human beings.

The Disappearing Human

Consider the transformation of service interactions during this period. The shift to "no-contact delivery" eliminated the brief moment of human recognition that occurred when food arrived at your door. That awkward exchange of goods for payment, the mutual acknowledgment between customer and worker—these micro-interactions disappeared behind digital interfaces that render human labor invisible.

This isn't merely about convenience. When we order food through an app and it appears on our porch without human contact, we're encouraged to experience the service as a technological phenomenon rather than work performed by another person. The breathing, living human who prepared and delivered the food becomes an invisible component in what feels like an automated system.

The implications extend beyond individual transactions. These technologies systematically reorganized social relations in the name of avoiding contagion.

However, as the threat of COVID has subsided, other logics of contagion have taken its place.

Social Contagion

Isn’t it remarkable how, after a layoff or other negative life event, friends sometimes mysteriously disappear? Many networking adages encourage people to surround themselves with successful, wealthy, or intelligent individuals and distance themselves from others. The logic of contagion treats individual traits or circumstances as infectious elements that we might catch through social proximity.

The COVID years embedded social contagion far deeper than ever before into our personal and professional lives. Thanks to technologies like no-contact delivery and the proliferation of mobile pre-ordering, we can enjoy the convenience of service without having to risk exposure to service workers.

The result is that, for those able to pay service fees and elevated in-app prices, it is easier than ever to live in a dense urban space while avoiding once-ordinary interactions with strangers from different walks of life.

Urban Interaction and Political Life

Urban theorists have long recognized that cities derive their democratic potential from density—from the unavoidable encounters between different kinds of people that occur when we share space. These chance interactions create opportunities for diverse communities to practice the art of living together.

Digital mediation threatens this fundamental dynamic of urban life.

The result is what Murray Bookchin warned against: the replacement of genuine city life with something far less beautiful—anonymous, homogenized, and institutionally dominated spaces that isolate us from each other despite physical proximity. The tools we adopted to stay safe from biological contagion may be making us sick in other ways.

The Social Anxiety Epidemic

What began as necessary social distancing has, for many, transformed into social avoidance rooted in anxiety rather than health concerns. The skills required for spontaneous human interaction—reading facial expressions, navigating conversational rhythms, managing the mild discomfort of encountering difference—atrophy without practice.

This creates a feedback loop: as face-to-face interaction becomes more challenging, digital alternatives become more appealing. Young adults who spent crucial social development years behind screens now report higher levels of social anxiety and preference for digital communication even in contexts where in-person interaction would be more effective.

The companies providing digital mediation services have obvious incentives to maintain this dynamic. Social anxiety is profitable when it drives people toward technological solutions for human connection.

The Path Forward

Understanding contagion as a rhetorical commonplace—a culturally available way of thinking about social relationships—reveals both the problem and potential solutions. Just as fear and mistrust spread through networks, so do trust, courage, and joy. The question is which contagions we choose to cultivate.

Discourse analysis of alternative technology movements shows promising developments: encrypted communication tools that don't harvest personal data, collaborative platforms that support democratic organizing, and decentralized systems that challenge corporate control of social interaction. These technologies suggest that digital mediation doesn't have to increase isolation or exploitation.

The real challenge isn't technological—it's social. Rebuilding the capacity for unmediated human interaction requires deliberately choosing vulnerability over convenience, direct engagement over digital comfort. This means accepting the mild social awkwardness that comes with talking to strangers, supporting local businesses that prioritize human service over efficiency, and creating opportunities for chance encounters in our communities.

What We're Really Measuring

The test of any social technology shouldn't be whether it increases convenience or efficiency, but whether it enhances our capacity for authentic human connection and collective flourishing. By this measure, many of the digital solutions we've embraced during the pandemic fail dramatically.

The rush toward technologically mediated interaction may have helped us survive a health crisis, but it's created new challenges for social wellbeing that we're only beginning to understand. As we shape the post-pandemic world, we have an opportunity to be more intentional about which digital tools serve human flourishing and which simply serve corporate profits.

The choice isn't between technology and human connection—it's between technologies that enhance our humanity and those that diminish it. Making this distinction requires recognizing that the convenience of avoiding human contact comes at a cost we may not be able to afford indefinitely.