About the Collection:

My archive consists largely of excerpts from my personal journal, which I started as a New Year's Resolution and have managed to keep every single day of 2020. This practice allowed me to document my transition to quarantine and remember more clearly what life looked like beforehand. Reading these journals now, 4 months into quarantine, my daily "struggles" are a vivid demonstration of privilege. Returning to a safe home environment with parents whose jobs allowed teleworking shielded me from the worst of the health and economic concerns which have harmed so many. These past four months have provided a consistent lesson in privilege, summed up sharply by the fact that I still do not know anyone personally who has died of COVID-19. Though I think this suburban pseudo-bliss is hardly worth documenting, I hope that it provides a demonstration of just how easy some Americans had it during the crisis. I find this relevant considering that it seemed to be largely upper-middle-class white people, whose experience was probably not too different from my own, who were most vocal and vitriolic in pushing for an end to the shutdown. A second theme in my archive is the role of technology in shaping our changed experiences. Zoom, in particular, served as a uniting force in allowing academic instruction to continue and in replacing in-person social engagement with Zoom "parties" and happy hours. At the same time, its easily navigable interface and Screen Share feature allowed it to become a tool of spreading hate speech in the form of "Zoom bombing," an incident which I experienced and documented in my archive. New technologies, like social media, have a history of opening doors to good and evil, something which was made all the more apparent during quarantine.