Digitalized social infrastructure and mental health during the COVID-19 crisis: Evidence from communities in Shanghai

Abstract

Social infrastructure has undergone a profound digitalization process, allowing people to adapt to newly emerged needs, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. From April to June 2022, communities in Shanghai were subject to a rigorous stay-at-home order (SHO), which ruptured residents' routine use of community social infrastructure and constrained their access to resources, possibly inducing mental health risks. Nonetheless, residents developed digitalized social infrastructure as a bottom-up approach to collectively manage the crisis, promoting community social capital and addressing resource insecurity. Based on a timely survey of 60 communities in Shanghai during the SHO, this research enquires how digitalized social infrastructure (re)constructed residents' community experience and how this process was associated with the change in wellbeing. The results showed substantial increases in both the number of neighbors greeting each other and the frequency of group-buying. Furthermore, the digitalized experience of addressing social and material needs was correlated with mental health in different ways. This contextualized research suggests that digitalized social infrastructure has yielded a complicated restructuring of community in both social and material spheres by enabling bottom-up innovation and participation yet excluding marginalized groups during the crisis.