What is Offline

“Social distancing,” combined with self-quarantining and self-isolating, are some of the few initial defensive stances for naïve humanity against a highly transmissible and contagious lethal pathogen, until more high-powered medical science-based interventions (therapeutics, vaccines) are available. “Social distancing” refers to various approaches: the physical distancing of people from each other, the wearing of face masks in public, the washing of hands to avoid contaminants from others' microbes, and others. On social media, social imagery labeled “social distancing” (by both folk tagging and automated machine tagging) may be studied to better understand the surprise of transitioning from modern hypersociality (oversharing, high connectance, lessened senses of personal privacy) to sudden social-physical distancing with only the mitigations of electronic connectivity. This work takes a systematized manual analysis of social imagery to better understand social-physical distancing in a present-day pandemic.