Mobile Consumer Habits During COVID-19 Pandemic
By: Zach Sterr
COVID-19 came as a shock to everyone around the world. Who would have thought that in the year 2020, the whole world we be put on quarantine and locked down to to a virus? People being quarantined in their homes for what started out as a two-week thing became months in isolation. At first people thought of it as a two weeks with the family, however those two weeks were the longest days. What was there to do?
For some people, their families or loved ones in their household bonded and spent quality time together playing board games. For the majority of the world, they turned to their mobile devices to pass the time and connect with those who they couldn’t see face-to-face. Mobile devices took a major leap in the first three months of 2020 compared to 2019’s first three months. Access to devices created an outlet for people to connect with others, pass time, create new ideas or start new careers.
Most Devices Made A Massive Increase in Usage in 2020 compared to 2019
According to Comscore.com, this chart shows the massive increase of mobile device use during the beginning of 2020. It is amazing to see how reliable people have became on mobile devices. It was a great thing for mobile devices to be around during this pandemic. In many cases, people remained in contact with loved ones, such a friends and family. I have heard plenty of stories about people not being able to visit their grandparents due to health risks, yet, mobile devices allowed people to talk on the phone and more importantly FaceTime. According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health, “A recent global survey showed that about 70 percent of internet users, especially the young generation worldwide, were using their smartphones or mobile phones more as a direct result of lockdown due to the coronavirus outbreak.”
Young Individuals Increasing the use of mobile devices due to COVID pandemic
I feel that many people felt disconnected from others since we couldn’t see other people in person. However, FaceTime was a huge plus for many people that got to see their loved ones. From personal experience, it made my day when I got to FaceTime my grandparents and see their faces and hear their voices. In addition, I was able to remain in contact with some of my best friends who live across the country from me.
However, this was a major positive thing for people during the pandemic. It had an everlasting affect on the way the world would operate in the future and human connection. The pandemic taught businesses, universities and people how they could operate differently. Remote work has become so much more popular ever since the start of the pandemic and businesses do not need as much, office space anymore. Being virtual has become the new normal and many people do not have a typical work space anymore. Virtual meetings, emails, phone calls and texts have replaced the normal work space. The world adopted the virtual workspace extremely fast. I believe this has many positives, however, there are some negative side affects to this.
All of this rise in virtual communication and lack of actual human interaction, I feel has altered some people’s way of communicating in person. From the pandemic, many people have increased anxiety and do not know how to properly communicate in real life. Mobile usage went up and so did communication with others, but that connection is not as strong as face-to-face interactions. The world we live in today is so much different than the one we lived in just 3 years ago. I think normalcy of human interaction has increased since the reliance of COVID. But I think the world needs to find a happy medium between virtual communication and actual in-person communication,
Sources:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7825859/#bib0003
https://theconversation.com/the-coronavirus-lockdown-is-forcing-us-to-view-screen-time-differently-thats-a-good-thing-135641
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2451958822000021
https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Blog/In-Home-Data-Usage-Increases-During-Coronavirus-Pandemic
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-81780-w