Video Chatting, Drinking, And Cooking: What Young People Are During During The Coronavirus Lockdown

More people than ever are staying indoors their homes and refraining from physical contact with their companions and families in a try to slow the spread of the coronavirus across the globe — and they’re finding creative ways to spend their time despite it all.


According to a MTV News/YouGov poll, 38 percent of Residents of the United States have called someone using video chat more than they typically do, and 37 percent have called someone more than they typically do. Yet that number jumps up in case you look at the most connected generations: Most Gen Zers have video chatted more than common over the last two weeks, and around half of millennials have video chatted more. A plurality of Gen Xers and boomers have been video chatting as frequently as they did two weeks ago.


That number isn’t specific to young people chatting with their companions, though: Zoom’s day-to-day mobile users jumped from a peak of 10 million to over 200 million in the three months that millions across the world started working and going to school from house. While segment of that increase might be attributed to users video-calling into meetings for their nine to five, video-chatting is also taking over church, weddings, funerals, and birthday parties across the nation. And, as Susan Pinker, a psychologist and author of “The Village Effect” instructed them New York Times, video chats are the closest thing we can do to actually interacting with the people we care about since it mimics our real-life interactions in which each person is “paying attention to the same thing at the same time.”


Nevertheless that doesn’t mean video chatting isn’t without its risks. Privacy experts have expressed concerns about Zoom immediately after a series of missteps from both users and the firm, including bugs that permit people to take control of webcams and microphones, the agencies data collection and storage policies, and unfriendly users Zoombombing videoconferences.


On the flip side, plenty of folks are attempting to log off for long periods of time. Young people, in particular, are finding ways to fill their time differently than they would if the lockdown wasn’t in place. Gen Zers are the most likely to be cooking food at residence more than they were two weeks back and Millennials are the most likely to be drinking more booze right now than they were two weeks back, according to the poll.