#social media use By Joseph Alexander Witrago
Medium 11
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Quarantine Check
n Mid-March, the state of California put in place a stay at home order due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. This required schools, businesses, and public places including parks to shut down in order to halt the spread of the virus. This confined people to their homes leaving them with lots of time to kill. It seems that a lot of that time was spent on our digital devices, and more specifically social media platforms. A new study reveals that the usage of social media went up by 61% since the start of COVID-19. The same study revealed an increase across all messaging platforms specifically among 1834 year olds. Eighteen-year-old David Serrano, a senior and football player for Duarte High School before the start of the stay at home order, only had one social media platform he was on, Facebook. Serrano was hardly ever active on any digital media platform, but that all changed Andrew Witrago after being told to stay home and practice social
distancing. Serrano since he has been on lockdown has downloaded Instagram and Twitter to keep connected with his family and friends. “Before the pandemic, they were too much to keep up with and I would get bored,” said Serrano. “I saw my friends at school and during football practice or when I went to hang out with them.” Serrano is not alone in this, the usage and downloads of social media have risen since the start of the pandemic. There are millions of videos that can be found on social media and most of them are not necessarily related to the COVID-19. Although what people have decided to do because they are confined to their homes, you can find hundreds of trends that can be found across all platforms of digital media. For example, quarantine challenges, new hobbies, quarantine life and much more. Before the stay at home order, when school was still filled with students, and sports were being played, Andrew Witrago said soccer was his therapy and escape. Today, the varsity starting 11 goalkeeper for Monrovia High School is stuck at home and has turned to posting videos of his soccer stunts on Tik-Tok as a way to cope with his lack of game time. “I was so bored. My options were staying in the house or juggling the ball in my backyard,” said Witrago. “I heard of this app called Tik-Tok earlier this year, and I usually go on to watch videos, but now I have decided to make and post my own videos.”
