Life will get worse for marginalized communities as greater inequality and rampant misinformation is still an ongoing result of the COVID-19 pandemic and sweeping societal changes, according to the opinions of experts in a study by the Pew Research Center.
A canvassing of experts in technology, communications and social change by Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center finds that many will be even more negatively impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic in years to come.
“We need to train a large new cadre of tele-care workers to help deal with the residual effects of COVID-19 (including contact tracing).”
Schools, conferences, mental health and general health care will be forever reimagined to consider hybrid ways of approaching services. But this is more likely to be something that magnifies inequality rather than actually doing the connective work that could be possible.
The biggest unknown in the United States concerns political leadership
Abigail De Kosnik, associate professor and director of the Center for New Media at the University of California, Berkeley, predicts that in some ways, widespread fear and anxiety will have positive results, as people will be more environmentally conscious than ever before and will engage en masse in efforts to regulate corporate resource extraction and pollution, and will show a collective willingness to adopt less environmentally harmful lifestyles. She expects a huge upsurge in mass transit use and a corresponding movement to improve the quality of mass transit in cities across the U.S. However, the paranoia will be justified because there will be fewer opportunities for college graduates who do not have family connections, and climate change will make large regions uninhabitable. This will lead to huge problems in mental health and will negatively impact at least a couple of generations of Americans in terms of their relationships, sense of self and lifetime- happiness quotient.
Mental health will suffer as loneliness, financial struggles and competitive forces still pressure individuals.
Digital life was already high-stress for some people prior to the required social isolation brought on by the pandemic. Now, the shift to tele-everything will be extensive and that will diminish in-person contact and constrict tech users’ real-world support systems and their social connections even more.
Source: Pew Research Center
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