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Embracing the Chaotic Side of Zoom
Here is the beginning of a wonderful article.
Three years ago, the political analyst and South Korea expert Robert Kelly was giving a live interview on the BBC, via videoconference, from his home office in Busan, when his two young children barged into the room. The pair—a jauntily assertive, glasses-wearing preschooler and a baby who skittered in, as if propelled by a mysterious force, on a wheeled walker—were pursued and eventually apprehended by their frantic mother, who, on her hands and knees, hustled the saboteurs out and pulled the office door shut. The video quickly went viral, but I had forgotten about it until recently, when the videoconferencing service Zoom, and the circumstances under which I and many others had begun to use it, reminded me of Kelly’s thin smile and his wife’s desperately grappling arms.
As the coronavirus pandemic made its rapid and implacable advance across the United States, forcing sweeping closures of schools and workplaces and bringing about the disappearance of any type of collective, real-world activity, it became obvious that a new era had begun. With millions of Americans self-quarantining for the foreseeable future, Zoom became, seemingly overnight, not only a professional lifeline but also a way of life. Suddenly, we couldn’t see anyone in person, but everyone appeared to be seeing one another on Zoom—at college lectures and in elementary-school P.E. classes, at cardio-kickboxing training and on kindergarten playdates. Some nights, after spying screenshots posted on social media of acquaintances raising glasses during a virtual cocktail party, one might experience Zoom fomo. Other evenings, one navigated conflicting Zoom plans. “I have two friends I watch a movie with, and now I have to push that to another day because of a surprise birthday party,” a friend told me.
Being confined to our homes, often with roommates or family members or pets, and having no clear separation between work and leisure, has given rise to a culture whose weirdness Zoom has made particularly legible. Nowadays, we are all Robert Kelly. In an article in the Times, Brian X. Chen provided Zoom-specific etiquette tips: “Our families are more important than anyone, but that doesn’t mean our colleagues want to see our partners in their bathrobes, our cats sitting on keyboards or our children throwing toys.” On the Cut, Lizzie Post, Emily Post’s great-great-granddaughter, weighed in on inappropriate Zoom behavior. Drinking coffee or tea during a meeting is fine, but, she warned, “avoid slurping”; she, too, vetoed bathrobes. On NPR’s “All Things Considered,” the USA Today columnist Steven Petrow said, bluntly, “If you need to go to the bathroom . . . turn off the video. Turn off the audio, because sound is louder than you think.”
As I encountered these well-meaning suggestions, I felt a resistance rising within me. Surely the haste with which we have had to adjust to the new reality—and the insistence with which the human element tends to insert itself into the supposedly seamless world of technology—makes it inevitable that Zoom, like life itself, will be chaotic. And, although I might be more interested than most in seeing colleagues in bathrobes and cats on keyboards, or hearing a co-worker’s surprisingly noisy peeing, I also suspect that embracing rather than rejecting this chaos would be a gain even for those less prying than me. As long as we’re living in a trying time, why pretend otherwise? At a moment when the stakes of real-life unpredictability are deadly serious, Zoom is a space in which to safely welcome unpredictability and looser boundaries....
As the coronavirus pandemic made its rapid and implacable advance across the United States, forcing sweeping closures of schools and workplaces and bringing about the disappearance of any type of collective, real-world activity, it became obvious that a new era had begun. With millions of Americans self-quarantining for the foreseeable future, Zoom became, seemingly overnight, not only a professional lifeline but also a way of life. Suddenly, we couldn’t see anyone in person, but everyone appeared to be seeing one another on Zoom—at college lectures and in elementary-school P.E. classes, at cardio-kickboxing training and on kindergarten playdates. Some nights, after spying screenshots posted on social media of acquaintances raising glasses during a virtual cocktail party, one might experience Zoom fomo. Other evenings, one navigated conflicting Zoom plans. “I have two friends I watch a movie with, and now I have to push that to another day because of a surprise birthday party,” a friend told me.
Being confined to our homes, often with roommates or family members or pets, and having no clear separation between work and leisure, has given rise to a culture whose weirdness Zoom has made particularly legible. Nowadays, we are all Robert Kelly. In an article in the Times, Brian X. Chen provided Zoom-specific etiquette tips: “Our families are more important than anyone, but that doesn’t mean our colleagues want to see our partners in their bathrobes, our cats sitting on keyboards or our children throwing toys.” On the Cut, Lizzie Post, Emily Post’s great-great-granddaughter, weighed in on inappropriate Zoom behavior. Drinking coffee or tea during a meeting is fine, but, she warned, “avoid slurping”; she, too, vetoed bathrobes. On NPR’s “All Things Considered,” the USA Today columnist Steven Petrow said, bluntly, “If you need to go to the bathroom . . . turn off the video. Turn off the audio, because sound is louder than you think.”
As I encountered these well-meaning suggestions, I felt a resistance rising within me. Surely the haste with which we have had to adjust to the new reality—and the insistence with which the human element tends to insert itself into the supposedly seamless world of technology—makes it inevitable that Zoom, like life itself, will be chaotic. And, although I might be more interested than most in seeing colleagues in bathrobes and cats on keyboards, or hearing a co-worker’s surprisingly noisy peeing, I also suspect that embracing rather than rejecting this chaos would be a gain even for those less prying than me. As long as we’re living in a trying time, why pretend otherwise? At a moment when the stakes of real-life unpredictability are deadly serious, Zoom is a space in which to safely welcome unpredictability and looser boundaries....
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/27/embracing-the-chaotic-side-of-zoom
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