Hanging Out Online: Social Life During the Pandemic

In March 2020, the government of India ordered a nationwide lockdown to prevent the spread of Covid-19. This led to the shutdown of educational institutes throughout the country, restricting all activities to online mediums. The shift has affected how students engage with each other, where rather than in-person interaction, they meet through a variety of online tools. In this paper, we discuss how the normal everyday routine of ‘hanging out’ with friends has been transformed during a prolonged lockdown of over ten months and counting. We investigate the opportunities and challenges students encounter when socializing online through various online modes including video calls, communal movie watching and social media. We discuss how social interaction; in particular, hanging out with friends has been transformed through these technologies and its implications for facilitating spontaneous interaction, negotiating intimacy, mutual understanding, and accessibility to different social groups. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of how these factors impact the transition from in-person to online modes of casual social interaction.