Viral Epistolary: A Digital Community for Individual and Collective Writing at the Time of the First COVID-19 Wave

The chapter addresses a case-study referring to a collective writing project called ‘Viral Epistolary’ (VE) launched through a web-site and social media accounts during the initial wave of COVID-19 pandemic in the context of the first Italian lockdown (from March to June 2020). VE’s aimed to create an online meeting-point for sharing feelings and views related to domestic isolation, physical distancing, and quarantine pandemic experiences by using the epistolary genre as a mediation, meaning-making, and auto-biographical tool. In particular, the core project was aimed at creating a digital space for sharing experiences through anonymous digital letters’ writing that could solicit replies from a wider on-line community. Although not originally conceived as part of a research project, VE ended up in providing such a rich and stimulating wealth of materials (letters, posts, drawings) that the team involved in this initiative later decided to reconceive the aims and scope of the project and, provided that all participants were informed and requested to express their agreement, an attempt was made to analyse the outcomes of the first three months of this project within a wider theoretical and epistemological framework, aware of the risks and limits implied in any attempt to observe a phenomenon while it is still ongoing. Thus, this chapter provides an analysis of a specific phase of VE’s experience, i.e. the initial one coinciding with the most obscure and heterogeneous expectations about such an unknown experience (i.e. a global pandemic affecting humans), since Italy was among the western countries which immediately adopted (i.e. in March 2020) the most comprehensive lockdown measures.