Living with the Lockdown continues, taking a look at the social side of life. Reduced time seeing and talking to our loved ones will its toll. Forced isolation may well be necessary at this time but luckily in the modern world, we have multiple options to help pass the time and interact with each other digitally. In part two of this blog series, I’ll take you through some of our favourites.
- Major Social Media sites – It may seem obvious, but Facebook, twitter and the like offer a wide number of users, video calling, messaging and daily social interaction. Setting up group chats of everyone in your family or group of friends should be step one either on Facebook or Whatsapp. The likelihood is that these group chats already exist in some capacity. Use this opportunity to widen the net a little, get in touch with people you may not have spoken to as regularly, create little digital communities and help each other get through the isolation.
- Houseparty – A relatively up and coming app, it takes Facetime into a social networking forum. With integrated games like Pictionary and Charades it allows you the closest thing to face to face interaction with up to 8 people at a time.
- Discord – Usually used for gaming discussion in place of in game chats, Discord offers both text and voice chat for multiple users. You can chat one on one or add multiple users into groups. These groups archive your comments and chats allowing people to drop in and out without missing anything and also provides drop in voice chats at the click of a button. It also offers in browser use along with a downloadable application. All the hard work taken out of a dedicated chat service.
- Teamspeak – Perhaps a slightly more technical version, Teamspeak offers a more stripped back experience than Discord as it only really offers voice chat features. A downside of Teamspeak is that it requires a user to download and run a dedicated server version of the programme. This can produce performance issues if the host’s internet connection is unreliable. However, once up and running, it offers the best sound quality on the market in our experience.
These are just a few of the options. There are more out there to be found but starting here could hopefully make a big difference to you need to socialise. I’m not a doctor, or even a computer scientist. There’s not a lot I can do to help except stay inside, and it’s something i’ve been subconsciously planning for all my life it seems! If I can help pass the time for anyone, even for a moment, then I’ll be happy.
If you have any tips, suggestions or just want to get in touch, please drop us an email at admin@sourcepulp.com or comment on any of social media posts, or message those accounts!
Stay safe. All the best
Sourcepulp 