Lost in translation: virtual parties from pandemic times

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7764/cdi.57.62623

Keywords:

parties; youth; onlife; pandemic; platforms; sociality; Zoom; Zoom fatigue.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic led young people to use digital platforms such as Zoom to maintain relationships and celebrate events, transforming online parties and sociability. This study focuses on analyzing youth virtual parties as onlife experiences during and after the pandemic, exploring the challenges of mediating social aspects into digital environments and their implications for human interactions. This qualitative research is based on a digital ethnography of social gatherings or parties organized digitally, based on interviews with young university students from Guayaquil during the first stage of the pandemic lockdown (2020) and almost two years later, in post-pandemic (2022). The results show that, unlike work and study, which have adapted to virtuality, the party is difficult to translate to the logic of the screens, so the bodies have returned to the spaces where they had known how to resonate together. The research leaves open questions regarding the displacement of meaning and the use of platforms to explore the modalities of linking ourselves to others in the future.

Author Biographies

María Mercedes Zerega-Garaycoa, Universidad Casa Grande, Guayaquil, Ecuador

María Mercedes Zerega Garaycoa, general director of the Research, Innovation, and Creativity Department at Universidad Casa Grande. Member of the research group Contemporary Digitalities of that university, in the research line Culture, Aesthetics, and Communication in Media Convergence. Professor-researcher in the fields of Humanities, Communication, new technologies, youth, educational innovation, and creation.

Héctor Bujanda, Universidad Casa Grande, Guayaquil, Ecuador

Héctor Bujanda, member of the research group Contemporary Digitalities in the research line Culture, Aesthetics, and Communication in Media Convergence. Professor-researcher in the area of Humanities, Arts, and Journalism. Coordinator of the master's program in Digital Journalism at Universidad Casa Grande.

Mabel Valeria González-Cogliano, Universidad Casa Grande, Guayaquil, Ecuador

Mabel Valeria González-Cogliano, academic research coordinator of the Graduate Faculty of Universidad Casa Grande. Researcher at the Contemporary Digitalities group at Universidad Casa Grande. Her teaching and research are linked to issues regarding the impact of the digital on current subjectivity, and the exploration of methodologies to investigate the digital phenomenon in its different manifestations.

Alberto López-Navarrete, Universitat Politècnica de València, Valencia, España

Alberto López-Navarrete, Ph.D. student in Communication Industries at Universitat Politècnica de València, has worked as a senior research technician in the Department of Audiovisual Communication, Documentation, and Art History. His research interests revolve around digital communication, social media, and multimodal discourse analysis. He is a member of the coordinating team for the International Congress Comunica2 and has contributed to international research projects such as ENHANCE Alliance, part of the European University Initiative.

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Published

2024-01-18

How to Cite

Zerega-Garaycoa, M. M., Bujanda, H., González-Cogliano, M. V., & López-Navarrete, A. (2024). Lost in translation: virtual parties from pandemic times. Cuadernos.Info, (57), 293–314. https://doi.org/10.7764/cdi.57.62623