On March 11, 2020 Coronavirus was confirmed as a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO). A pandemic is a disease that is spreading in multiple countries globally at the same time. That caused most of the countries to take urgent actions to respond to their own outbreak. The novel Coronavirus has been known as COVID-19. Recently, nearly all governments instituted social distancing or social restriction measures in their countries. Due to all these restrictions and measures, people are home now, as they can't be physically and socially active. As a result, there is a sharp increase in the subcultures' role of social media and internet communities.
In Canada, from the beginning of the crisis, I noticed a lot of posts in many community Facebook groups I followed, where people were looking for places to buy Lysol or N95 masks as these items were sold out in stores. This high demand resulted in an indirect branding for those products as most people got the impression to have them urgently to protect themselves from being inflicted. As a result, many people used their ‘insider’ knowledge to create DIY videos/posts to help others make their masks, hand sanitizers, and cheap effective disinfectant for house cleaning. This can be called ‘bricolage’ which refers “to a do-it-yourself (DIY) tinkering process where you make something new out of other things”. Accordingly, many people are now using different social media like Instagram or YouTube to learn how to use the available stuff in their houses and craft or make their needed things; for example, to make masks out of the material like wet tissues, bags, and coverings or gloves out of plastic bags.
Another form of ‘bricolage’ is internet communities that were sent to my email as the result of the pandemic. These are “exercise coteries that have risen online because of ‘shelter in place’ restrictions” like online gymnastics classes where some modified exercises using available things at homes are practiced. This is the one my kids are now practicing online unlimited classes with the symbolic fees for the whole family being only $40. So, they are exercising at home instead of going to the gym physically. And they even offer online birthday parties for free.
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At the same time, during the COVID-19 pandemic, different subculture groups have changed their normal way of reacting or responding to people’s needs. As an example, we saw that a mother posted her son’s sadness on his birthday for not having a birthday party and then a group of police cars went to the son’s house, horned and sang ‘Happy Birthday’ for the son, making it both a special day for the son and an effective story on the media. As we know, it’s not normal in police subculture to react like that to a message on twitter; however, the current pandemic situation brings about such reactions to messages on social media because the police force understands that young kids can’t understand what is going on during this period and why they can’t invite their friends to a birthday party, so having the authority to do such manoeuvres, they tried to compensate for the restrictions for young kids.
The other prevalent element on social media during this pandemic was the rise of grassroots productions of expressive cultural forms that were dominant among all social media platforms. As can be observed, people try to create their way to cope with this unexpected situation, using a variety of expressive cultural activities such as posting/ sharing so many music, memes, branks and vidding. According to Wikipedia, vidding is “the fan labour practice in the media fandom of creating music videos from the footage of one or more visual media sources, thereby exploring the source itself in a new way”. Vidding was widely used during this Quarantine to give people fun by doing grassroots, filmmaking or video making, and adding music to the images/videos. Furthermore, Pinkfrog company, who has been known after the “Baby Shark” song, launched a “Hand Wash Challenge” song with especial dance as a backup to help parents encourage their kids to bump up their hygiene in a funny way during this global pandemic.
Social media platforms have also helped dominant cultures, such as government, to create new rules/laws and take measures during this hard time. Through social media, people have also shared pictures/videos requesting the government to close parks as so many irresponsible people are gathering and enjoying their time, deviating social distance regulations. Besides, sharing posts about the availability or the prices of in-demand items (sanitizers, wipes, toilet paper, etc.) can also help online marketplaces (Facebook marketplace, Amazon, Kijiji, etc.) to block people from selling them at a higher price. For example, reacting to viral images about selling containers of wipe several times higher than its normal price in a Food store, the Ontario premier, Doug Ford, announced that price gouging would be made illegal in the Cabinet meeting.
In sum, we are witnessing the social media playing a more active and diverse role in everyone’s life making all people from any race or culture share their messages, photos, videos, etc. for different purposes ranging from sharing information, preventing crime, stabilizing market prices, helping others satisfy their needs, having fun in their loneliness, educating each other and lots of others. This is exactly what is called ‘cultural adaptations’ through which people change their behaviour and their surroundings to “accommodate hazards frequently”. The degree of the modification and adaptation depends on the frequency of the hazardous happening, how unexpectable was the event, the severity of the consequences, and its geographical scope.
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