The Digital Drinking Era: How to socialise.... By Yourself.

The current pandemic has seen the closure of all clubs and bars in the UK.

As a result of these closures, people have found alternative ways to ‘go to the bar’ with their friends, naming it ‘Digital Drinking’.

Here’s how you can still have a night out with your mates, through your phone or laptop.

You can still see your favourite DJ perform – if you had concert tickets that have been deemed useless, or club night tickets that have been cancelled, performers are using both Instagram live and Facebook live to broadcast their sound sets straight to your home!

‘Quarantine Concerts’ seem more important now than ever, and social media has become the biggest concert venue ever! The musicians make a post on their social media telling their fans to tune in at a certain time and they get a free concert and interaction with their favourite artists.

Performers are using the #TogetherAtHome tag on all of their live streams.

Arguably the biggest concert in America was supposed to commence today, Coachella. Fear not, you can still get your valley desert feels as Coachella: 20 years in the desert, a documentary about the annual music festival airs at 8 pm on the 10th of April. Watch it here.

Alternatively, if you are missing your house parties – the app Houseparty will be the perfect solution for you!

The Houseparty app allows you to facetime with up to eight of your closest friends! It even has a feature that allows you to ‘lock’ your room if you don’t want anyone else to join you.

You can chat with one friend in the room using the private chats,

It’s like you are actually at a house party!

Another app that has blown up recently is Zoom, Amy, a Cardiff University student uses Zoom to have her Friday night pub quiz with her friends.

“We have a friend who used to do pub quizzes, he writes the quiz and then I set up a Zoom meeting and invite everyone and they join in their laptops (Zoom have kindly waived the 40 meeting time limit for new accounts which is great for new users self-isolating).”

In this unprecedented time, people are finding new ways to make sure their life changes as little as possible, and ways to bring joy to people as best they can.