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Collected Item: “Digitally Traversing Social Distances: Zoom Trivia with Friends”

Give your story a title.

Digitally Traversing Social Distances: Zoom Trivia with Friends

What sort of object is this: text story, photograph, video, audio interview, screenshot, drawing, meme, etc.?

Photograph, personal

Tell us a story; share your experience. Describe what the object or story you've uploaded says about the pandemic, and/or why what you've submitted is important to you.

This photo depicts me and my university friends catching up over Zoom and playing trivia. We played trivia multiple times over zoom, usually most Fridays, as a regular way to socialise while we were all apart during university holidays and Melbourne's second lockdown. The rules of our trivia games were as follows: every player would contribute $5, different people would volunteer to make trivia questions on whatever category they choose (including memes, dog breeds, logos etc.) and the overall winner that week would use the prize money to buy alcohol of their choice (we are students after all). We also had dress-up themes like sports and beach-wear, and bonus points would be allocated to best-dressed. These nights were the highlight of my week and gave me something to look forward to, breaking up the monotony of university assignments and lockdown. At the time this photo was taken, I had left Melbourne and was in hotel quarantine in Brisbane. This is also why zoom trivia worked well, because whilst some of my friends stayed in Melbourne, many of us moved out of the city to do lockdown with family in places like rural Victoria, New South Wales, Western Australia, and Queensland. Social media and video chats like Zoom functioned to connect us in new ways during the pandemic, and shows how the barriers of physical distance could be traversed via digital realms.
HIST30060.

Use one-word hashtags (separated by commas) to describe your story. For example: Where did it originate? How does this object make you feel? How does this object relate to the pandemic?

Zoom, friends, trivia, games, socialising, social distance, travel, digital, internet, video

Who originally created this object? (If you created this object, such as photo, then put "self" here.)

Jasmine Stephens

Give this story a date.

2020-08-09T21:28+10:00
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