Healing online? Social anxiety and emotion regulation in pandemic experience

Abstract

During the pandemic of Covid-19, internet-based communication became for many the primary, or only, means of interaction with others, and it has been argued that this had a host of negative effects on emotional and mental health. However, some people with a lived experience of mental ill-health also perceived improvements to their wellbeing during the period in which social activities were moved online.In this paper, I explore the possibility that some of these improvements are due to the partial “disembodiment” of emotions facilitated by internet-mediated interaction. In particular, I consider the phenomenology of social anxiety and how it may be impacted upon by encountering others primarily through the medium of internet-enabled technology.I will start by reconstructing a phenomenological account of social anxiety to which disruptions of bodily experience are central. I will then move to consider how the experiential dynamics that are particularly prominent in social anxiety can be weakened when communicating with others via video calls, instant messages, and social media more broadly. I will suggest that this is the case due to the diminished visibility of the body online, and the higher degree of control and agency over one’s experience that can be exercised in this context.Finally, I will argue that the weakening of social anxiety through internet-mediated contact exemplifies some of the processes which are key to emotion regulation more widely, thus suggesting that communication and interaction online could have a positive effect on a wider range of affective disturbances.

Widening the screen: embodied cognition and audiovisual online social interaction in the digital age

“…First, although we argue that the limitations many experience in AVOI can be conceptualised as a shrinking of social space, we do not want to claim that this experience is universal. As Bortolan (2023) describes in her insightful article, individuals suffering from mental ill-health like social anxiety report improvements in their mental wellbeing during the pandemic's forced social isolation. Bortolan points out that "social anxiety sufferers may experience online and offline environments in a way that can be very different from (and sometimes opposite to) what is the case for those who are not socially anxious" (ibid., p. 8).…”