The coronavirus pandemic drove life online. It may never return.

“What I’ve found as a historian is that emergencies, for example like World War I, World War II, the Great Depression, they tended to accelerate rather than necessarily innovate new kinds of relationships, new kinds of ways of life,” said Robert Kargon, a professor of the history of science at Johns Hopkins University.

“My argument has been that essentially these kinds of emergencies accelerate trends that already exist in society,” he said. “We’ve already seen how the internet is impinging on all kinds of activities in terms of work, leisure and so forth, and I think this is going to intensify it and it’s going to change certain things.”…

“In an emergency, technology can be fast-tracked,” said Amber Case, a researcher at the Institute for the Future, a nonprofit in Palo Alto, California, that does long-term forecasting. She said she expects a boost of research into technologies around online education and distributed computing, and she predicts that the experience of learning more things online will have wide ripple effects offline.