Paper short abstract:

Drawing from a collaborative NSF project and individual ethnographies, we show that digital social connections promote immune health and provide sources for psychological resilience during the pandemic, while exploring variable online opportunities and risks faced by marginalized communities.

Paper long abstract:

We argue that digital social connections can provide innovative sources of health resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic. We draw from collaborative and individual research carried out in the context of a Fall 2020 Culture of Virtual Worlds research methods seminar (taught by Jeffrey Snodgrass) at Colorado State University. Although digital social connections have been typically viewed as health risks rather than sources of mental resilience, research also shows that virtual identities can promote individual wellbeing. In the collaborative project, funded by NSF, we investigate whether, when, and how digital relationships and experiences promote rather than compromise health at the level of immune biology, in the context of dramatic losses of offline social connections and shifts into online contexts. Complementing that work, seminar students drew from psychological anthropological theories, including cultural consonance/dissonance, and employed mixed qualitative/quantitative ethnographic methods, to investigate links between virtual lives and health during the pandemic. Here, we synthesize findings, which includes studies of educational communities like Zoom classrooms, social interactions via media platforms such as TikTok, and online gaming, streaming, and fanfiction writing. Overall, we argue that digital lives can compensate individuals for their lack of crucial yet impossible offline connections, by creating new cultural niches for social connection and identity negotiation, while highlighting the variable opportunities and risks faced by marginalized communities in digital environments. The research combines biocultural and psychological anthropological approaches to gain new perspectives on health processes, including the continuing production of health disparities.