On the Transition of Social Interaction from In-Person to Online: Predicting Changes in Social Media Usage of College Students during the COVID-19 Pandemic based on Pre-COVID-19 On-Campus Colocation

ABSTRACT Pandemics significantly impact human daily life. People throughout the world adhere to safety protocols (e.g., social distancing and self-quarantining). As a result, they willingly keep distance from workplace, friends and even family. In such circumstances, in-person social interactions may be substituted with virtual ones via online channels, such as, Instagram and Snapchat. To get insights into this phenomenon, we study a group of undergraduate students before and after the start of COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, we track N=102 undergraduate students on a small college campus prior to the pandemic using mobile sensing from phones and assign semantic labels to each location they visit on campus where they study, socialize and live. By leveraging their colocation network at these various semantically labeled places on campus, we find that colocations at certain places that possibly proxy higher in-person social interactions (e.g., dormitories, gyms and Greek houses) show significant predictive capability in identifying the individuals’ change in social media usage during the pandemic period. We show that we can predict student’s change in social media usage during COVID-19 with an F1 score of 0.73 purely from the in-person colocation data generated prior to the pandemic.