Issue 45: All the Friends We Cannot See
2.6.21 | The pandemic’s toll on our social infrastructure
Hello,
The numbers of new Covid infections, hospitalizations, and deaths all continued to fall this week, firming up the proposition that we’ve made it to the far slope of the pandemic’s third peak. The pace of vaccination crept up too, in spite of disruptions caused by the unusually intense winter storm that washed over the country early in the week.
Granted it’s not much to celebrate—these measures of the pandemic are still in some cases as much as double what they were at the peak of the spring and summer waves, each of which constituted major crisis points. But even if you wanted to celebrate this encouraging downward trend, who would you celebrate with? What’s left of our social infrastructure, almost a year after the first stay-at-home orders went into effect?
This seems to be on a lot of people’s minds lately. Last week in The Atlantic Amanda Mull wrote about how strange life feels after months of pandemic lockdowns have eroded away our layers of casual friendships and acquaintances, and dimmed the background radiation of small talk with strangers and shop clerks, serendipitous encounters, overheard conversations, and the general human jostling that used to bathe us in sociality whenever we moved through public spaces.
A newly-published study by a team of Yale sociologists adds some detail to these observations. Comparing two waves of relationship survey data from June 2019 and June 2020, they found that people’s networks of self-reported social connections shrank dramatically after the lockdowns, and that the remaining networks were less dense — fewer of their contacts knew each other. Almost all of the network shrinkage came from peripheral contacts, and men’s networks shrank more than women’s.
Mull smartly draws on a classic concept from sociology to describe what we’ve lost: weak ties. These are those intermittent relationships we cultivate with, as she describes them, “the guy who’s always at the gym at the same time as you, the barista who starts making your usual order while you’re still at the back of the line, the co-worker from another department with whom you make small talk on the elevator.” Weak ties are important because they can act as bridges for us to a broader social world outside our circle of close family and friends, outside our familiar institutions, neighborhoods, and occasionally outside of our political, racial, class, or religious communities. Because weak ties are necessarily at the edges of your social group (if they were more central they’d be strong ties) they expose you to new information and new perspectives. They can help you find new job opportunities, new interests, new romantic partners, and to generally get outside of yourself a little.
Mark Granovetter visualized it this way in the paper where he coined the term, imagining a loose constellation of close relationship clusters bridged by weak ties:
But like most concepts that escape academia into popular culture, the idea of the weak tie picked up some distortions along the way. Chief among these is a focus on individuals rather than relationships. Points, rather than the lines between them. What determines the strength of a tie, Granovetter proposed, is some combination of time spent interacting, reciprocal intimacy or confiding in one other, mutual assistance, and emotional intensity. As a Hallmark card might put it: friendship is something you do, not something you have.
The collapse of the concept of the weak tie into a type of person, rather than an ongoing process of interrelationship, is an example of something Norbert Elias called process reduction. Language often traps us into describing dynamic things as static, he wrote:
“Standing by a river we see the perpetual flowing of the water. But to grasp it conceptually, and to communicate it to others, we do not think and say, ‘Look at the perpetual flowing of the water’; we say, ‘Look how fast the river is flowing.’ We say, ‘The wind is blowing,’ as if the wind were actually a thing at rest which, at a given point in time, begins to move and blow. We speak as if a wind could exist which did not blow.”
Ties aren’t people, any more than a river is a groove in the earth. Everything is in the flow between. If friendship is something you do, the pandemic has meant we’re doing a lot less of it, and doing it in different ways, and sometimes with different people. Stronger ties become weaker or go dormant; weak ties evaporate altogether, in some cases for good.
It’s normal for people to contract their social networks and turn inward during and immediately after a disaster or other shock, what researchers sometimes refer to as “turtling up.” But the Covid crisis is different because of its long duration. The modern disasters most of us are familiar with have a short acute phase and then a long period of recovery. This recovery period can go on for years or decades — for example New York City’s 311 hotline was still receiving hundreds of calls about damage from Hurricane Sandy five years after the storm. In my research interviews with disaster risk managers whenever I would ask “how do you know a disaster is over” some would cite the statutory definition, that a disaster is over when a locality can once again meet all of its usual needs with the resources it has on hand (marking the end of the disaster onset and response phases, which give way to recovery). But then even most of these folks would then sigh and say what the rest of their colleagues regularly told me, something to the effect of “honestly, a disaster is never over.”
The pandemic, again, is different. The shutdowns and ongoing waves of illness present a prolonged acute crisis at a scale unlike anything in modern experience, in the U.S. at least. There isn’t a modern precedent for much of the country turtling up for a year without any timetable for an “all-clear.” Because of the readiness with which influence ripples through social networks—research has shown that behaviors regularly exert measurable influence out to the third degree of separation, the friends of your friends’ friends—this dampening of social life affects even people who don’t take the pandemic seriously, or who do their damnedest to keep up pre-pandemic social habits.
It’s not just that people need social relationships for their psychological well-being, though we do. It’s not just that people rely on networks of family, institutional, and community ties to get the resources they need to survive and flourish, though we do. It’s that through interacting with people we experience the opportunities and constraints of the social world beyond ourselves. We see a version of the world and our place in it; and more than simply see society, through these interactions we make it. That’s the point that Elias was making — society is an activity, not a fabric; like the wind, it only exists in motion.
People seek out associational life. Beyond face-to-face interaction we build up parasocial relationships with people on television or over the internet. As the pandemic shut down in-person socialization, people interacted more online, often on social media platforms like Facebook that intentionally channeled users into political groups that maximized their engagement with likeminded people around polarizing issues. The disrupted public ecosystem of work and leisure that usually consumed people’s time began to free them from the old constraints on their attention, and diminished or altered opportunities to interact with people in their workplaces, neighborhoods, and social institutions. Unusual things started to happen. Some of them good, some of them harmful.
What’s happening in the late-pandemic social world is reminiscent of the weird complexities of global warming — how a hotter planet can paradoxically bring record-cold temperatures by disrupting the wind patterns that lock cold air into the arctic, allowing polar temperatures to surge down into the continental U.S. Or how it bends the jetstream, bringing torrential rains to drought-stricken parts of California before icing-over Chicago and dumping a foot and a half of snow on Central Park.
So phone a friend. Write a letter. Volunteer at a food bank or vaccination site. Make it social infrastructure week. You’ll make the world a better place.
// Friends of the Newsletter
When I started writing this newsletter last March I’m not sure how long I expected to keep it up. I certainly would have stopped by now if it weren’t for the hundreds of you who keep reading each week. So first of all I want to extend my deepest thanks to all of you, and to ask a question.
What would you like to see here in the next few months as this covid odyssey bends towards home? What outstanding questions do you still have, or topics would you like to see addressed? To let me know, just hit reply on this week’s email. And again, thank you for the company.
// Link Roundup
How long does your mask last? Say you’re a regular person working outside of a medical setting who’s managed to buy a pack of N95 or KN94 masks. You know the masks are disposable, but nobody can tell you how long they’re supposed to last. Do you toss it after one trip to the grocery store? The answer is no, fortunately, since high quality masks are both expensive and scarce. Charlie Warzel asked Zeynep Tufekci, who’s been doing research on masks for some time, for her advice: “If I were wearing an N95 just for the weekly grocery store run, I’d probably be fine with alternating two carefully handled masks for many months as long as the elastic works and there’s no soiling. … But if I were wearing one all day, every workday, I’d consider having one for each day and replacing them maybe every month. So that’s about five per month. Could one be really careful and make that two months? Probably.”
— “It’s Been 10 Months, and I Still Don’t Know When to Replace My Mask!” Charlie Warzel and Zeynep Tufekci, The New York Times.Where to get Covid data: For most of the pandemic the federal government’s data reporting on Covid was (deliberately) so shoddy that the best public source of information was The Atlantic’s Covid Tracking Project. Now that the feds have gotten their act together, the Covid Tracking Project plans to shut down March 7. The good news is that the CDC’s Covid Data Tracker site is incredibly detailed now, with county level reporting on all of the central metrics on cases, positivity, and hospitalization, but also mobility data and even news reports related to local outbreaks.
— “It’s Time: The COVID Tracking Project Will Soon Come to an End.” Erin Kissane and Alexis Madrigal, The Atlantic.The burden on women: Because of seismic shifts in the economy due to the pandemic, so many women have been pushed out of the labor force that they haven’t made up this small a share of workers since the 1980s. Women who are still working, especially mothers, are struggling to cope with inadequate childcare combined with the demands of working under pandemic conditions. The consequences will reverberate for a generation. As Helaine Olen writes: “Fast-forward 25, 40, heck, 50 years from now, and there will still be women with lesser amounts of retirement savings who are receiving smaller Social Security checks in old age — all because of what happened to them in 2020.” But the harms go much deeper than finances. As Angela Garbes writes, “I have essentially dropped out of the workforce and been absorbed into housework and caring for my children, where there are no wages, no protections, no upward path, just a repetitive circle. … I used to think ambition — the desire to be efficient and exceptional, to prove my worth — was a force that came from within. I wondered when mine would show up already. But that idea, like the blurry days of the past year, is long gone.”
— “The Numbers Don’t Tell the Whole Story: Unemployment statistics can’t capture the full extent of what women have lost.” Angela Garbes, New York.
— “America’s Mothers Are In Crisis.” Jessica Grose, The New York Times.
— “Three American Mothers, On The Brink.” Jessica Bennett, The New York Times.
— “The Pandemic Is Devastating A Generation of Working Women.” Helaine Olen, The Washington Post.
— “‘Taking side steps, turning down promotions’: How working mothers are barely coping during Covid-19.” Donna M. Owens, NBC News.
— “Should Mothers Get A Monthly $2,400 Stimulus Check? 'The Marshall Plan for Moms' is making waves.” Erin Delmore, NBC News.Clippy, but for vaccine appointments: One reason vaccine distribution is sluggish in the U.S. is that the software the federal government bought to schedule appointments, made by the consulting firm Deloitte, is an amateurish mess.
— “What Went Wrong With America’s $44 Million Vaccine Data System?” Cat Ferguson, MIT Technology Review.Underfunded vaccine infrastructure: Another reason for the slow pace of vaccination is that the previous administration intentionally withheld money from states to set up the infrastructure they needed to distribute the shots.
— “Trump Officials Actively Lobbied to Deny States Money for Vaccine Rollout Last Fall.” Nicholas Florko, STAT.Why you haven’t gotten a cold or flu this year: There’s been hardly any flu activity at all in the U.S. this year, and circulation of other respiratory viruses has been way down, too. It’s true all over the world — anti-Covid measures seem to have disrupted the spread of all kinds of pathogens. That’s good news for now, but in the case of flu in particular, the lull in activity could make it harder for us to predict which strains to vaccinate people against next year. “Flu viruses haven’t gone extinct,” Katherine Wu writes. “They’re temporarily in hiding. And no one’s quite sure when, or how, they will return.”
— “The Pandemic Broke the Flu.” Katherine J. Wu, The Atlantic.Order take-out: Just because indoor dining is available in some places doesn’t mean it’s safe or a good idea for you, for the restaurant staff, or for your community. “A November Stanford University study identified full-service restaurants as ‘superspreader’ sites, and a recent University of California analysis found line cooks to be the workers at highest risk for death from Covid-19,” Helen Rosner writes. “Order takeout and leave a tip for the staff as if you were dining in; buy a gift card—and, to help the considerable number of servers, bussers, etc., who remain unemployed, donate to hospitality-worker relief funds, restaurant-staff GoFundMes, and the like. The arguments for actually taking a seat inside are more inward-facing, and emotional. … All these reasons, at their core, come down to the same thing: I really want to. And who doesn’t want to? … Given where we are right now, though, in New York and in the country as a whole, ‘I really want to’ doesn’t feel like enough.”
— “The Indoor-Dining Debate Isn’t a Debate at All.” Helen Rosner, The New Yorker.Reckoning with what we’ve lost: Take time for this unusually good installment of This American Life — a moving interview with a Black Capitol Hill Police Officer about his experience of the attack; a funny and insightful piece about how much we need gossip and how to get it under the conditions of the pandemic; and a wonderful story about a boy who had just started making his first friends in middle school when everything shut down. Truly one of the best hours I’ve spent listening in the last few months.
— “The Empty Chair.” Ira Glass et al, This American Life.
That’s it for this week! Thanks for reading as always. Tell a friend at your virtual super bowl party tomorrow about the newsletter, and I’ll see you in your inbox next Saturday.