Cell phone surveillance is increasing with the coronavirus.

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By Guy Parmentier, HDR Lecturer at Grenoble IAE, and Zoé Masson, PhD student in management, innovation, creativity at the University of Grenoble. Post originally published on The Conversation and republished on Méta-Media with permission.

“Being alone together”, since their confinements, individuals mobilize online communities, to support each other, entertain themselves, and contribute to stemming the pandemic virus. Communities are “ collectives based on geographic and emotional proximity , involving direct and authentic interactions between their members”, according to Quebec sociologist Serge Proulx.

The virtual has created a new form of line database proximity that favors the emergence of virtual communities. These create affinities between their members . There are two main categories of communities : communities of practice where attention is paid to sharing and learning new ways of doing things, and epistemic communities, whose objective is the acquisition of new knowledge.

With the lockdown, these online communities have grown significantly. Often mixing the two categories, could these communities constitute a third category: “crisis communities”?

An accelerated implementation process
The context of the Covid-19 crisis has a catalytic effect on the creation of new virtual platforms. Online communities need time to build themselves, find their audience and create links between users. The current phenomenon, on the other hand, seems to accelerate this process of implementation. The tools necessary for the creation of new virtual communities are pre-existing (websites, social networks), facilitating the birth of quickly functional communities.