With 2020 drawing to a close, we’ve asked our writers to tell us about the moments that made the year for them.
2020 has been an absolute disaster movie of a year. It’s straightforwardly been dominated by a storyline straight from the mind of some Hollywood overlord. Except in this unfortunate scenario we don’t get to enjoy Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, using his neck and earlobe to single handedly close the San Andreas fault. Clearly that doesn’t happen in the film, but it would be more believable than attempting to explain our current wheelie bin-fire reality to a 2018 time travelling past-self.
While we sat and watched in disbelief as people lost their collective shit all around the world (sighs in the general direction of 5G Mast/Anti-mask conspiracies), there was one unexpectedly pleasant thing that 2020 offered us that we’ll all hopefully now treasure moving forward into the Covid vaccine era: our personal digital communities. Looking past the technology, and focusing on the human interaction, suddenly things that we took for granted and probably offered little more than personal apathy toward became something to look forward to, pubs were replaced by video calls, parties replaced by Zoom parties. Hell, Jason Manford’s weekly quiz became something to mark down as a reminder on the calendar.
Distinct from the general throng of social media, our personal digital communities became, more than ever, the go to place for people to share similar interests. This was especially welcome after realising, for the 5th time in a week, that you were subjecting yourself to hours of social media scrolling and endless, rage inducing, comment section, dumpster diving. The urge to chuck your phone away, feeling nothing but increasing disgust for yourself and utter contempt for the rest of society, has been common.
However, somehow, amongst the echo chamber of monotonous social media idiocy it was possible to revel amongst like minded people, with similar tastes, passions and positivity, and it all thrived in the digital community. My community personally circulated around culture and music – especially trance music. Where general social media brought anger and hatred fuelled by fake profiles, bots, and human trolls, my personal digital community offered an appreciation of culture, film, music and like minded people. Live streams brought to light a similar type of personality that you might previously have found on a good night out, someone that you might bump into at a gig and become instant single serving best friends. That sound person who knows the ID of the track that the DJ is currently banging out of the speakers, they were there too.
