Abstract

The purpose of this study is to conduct with the aim of examining the socio-cultural impact of the COVID-19 pandemic that swept the world around 2020, and examining the transformation of norms and social problems through this. To this end, the characteristics of changes in the socio-cultural norms of the 14th century European Black Death, a representative example of the pandemic, were derived, and based on this, the COVID-19 pandemic was analyzed. The Black Death, which cost a third of Europe's population in the 14th century, changed social norms based on existing religious authority and feudal power, leading to the transition to Enlightenment, which seeks to carve out the world with human values and human thoughts and efforts. The population decline and labor shortage also promoted commercialization and mechanization. Printing, which spread during this period, led to the popularization of knowledge, which raised the level of thinking and led to epochal scientific development, which became the foundation of the Industrial Revolution. The recent COVID-19 pandemic triggered changes in social norms like the Black Death. Changes to a rapidly spreading non-face-to-face society have spread the technological environment of metaverse, a mixture of virtual and reality. The characteristics of metaverse interacting online through avatars have changed the personality from the norm that individual identity should be composed and maintained in a single way to a free and open identity that exerts various potentials. In addition, memes that are friendly to those who have the same worldview as themselves on the metaverse worked in a way that weakened a sense of isolation in non-face-to-face situations. With the new social problems created by the newly constructed social norms, discussions were held on what there would be the conflict of leadership between the past and the new norms and unexpected new social problems.