The social recession will hit certain groups especially hard — older people, people with disabilities, people who live alone. Building a virtual world to replace a broken physical one is not a new idea. One thing we know for certain is that actively participating in online culture is far better than passively consuming it. In San Bernardino, Calif., David Perez created a Facebook group called California Coronavirus Alerts to share localized information with his neighbors. But it’s also possible that after spending years using technologies that mostly seemed to push us apart, the coronavirus crisis is showing us that the internet is still capable of pulling us together.

Source: New York Times March 17, 2020 13:00 UTC