Z is for Zooming

Have you been zooming in the past few days?  As Covid-19 restrictions are reducing, the need to talk through an electronic interface may become less pressing.  However, I think the habit is likely to continue.  Despite psychotherapists and clinical psychologists telling us we will miss the subtle non-verbal cues that illuminate face-to-face conversations, seeing while speaking is a much richer and more meaningful experience than simply using voice, or, even worse, texting.

Combining voice and image in telecommunications has a long history.  My first experience with this was back in 2006, when Cisco introduced a videoconferencing system called TelePresence.  It was designed for meetings held in telepresence rooms.  Each room had half of an oval conference table, at which two or six people could sit.  They would be facing one or three large television screens, which created the illusion the conference table continued, and on the screens, life size, you would see a matching one or three other participants, seated in other telepresence rooms.  Since every room was the same, the high resolution equipment gave the illusion you were sitting together.  Simple to use, the system offered a quality experience, even if it was rather costly!  Once I had taken part in a couple of telepresence sessions, I quickly forgot about the technology, and just enjoyed the meetings (if enjoyable meetings isn’t an oxymoron).

Videoconferencing systems like Cisco’s can now be seen as a form of intermediate technology, a stepping stone to something cheaper and more flexible.  Cisco replaced their system with WebEx, which had the benefit of running off desktop or laptop computers, supporting meetings anywhere, anytime, as well as an online training medium.  They also introduced the wonderfully named Jabber for voice and video calls.  These products and those of competitors have been used by companies and educational institutions for years.  Skype filled that gap for personal users, and then came FaceTime, and other systems.  Now, today, it seems we’re all zooming!

Why Zoom?  In a hilarious meditation on fast start-ups and zooming, Erin Griffiths explored the word, and why others like it are constantly appearing.  She spoke with  Californian consultant who told her: “The strongest brands are evocative, not descriptive” and added, “people with engineering backgrounds don’t always see the value of a good metaphor. And now they’re all in the shadow of Zoom”.  Once started, Erin was off:

“Start-ups are supposed to be very, very fast. They “move fast and break things,” they “hire fast, fire fast” “and they certainly fail fast. They have a magazine: Fast Company. They have a diet: intermittent fasting.  Some companies are literal about it. They put it right in their name. FastPay, Fastpath, Fastly. Qwick, Quikr, Quikly. Instacart, Instabase, Instawork. You get it.  But many more prefer to convey their speed even speedier — faster than human brains can comprehend words. Kill complicating factors like context and connotation and replace them with sounds. Zoom, Vroom,  boom! Investors have swooned.” [i]

Was Zoom a fast start-up?  I don’t know.  Probably.  More to the point, Zooming is about fast communications.  I can imagine many people like to say, rather impressively, “Yes, we sorted that out on Zoom yesterday.” So speedy.  Is there anything more we need to know? [ii]

Why Zoom?  At one level that is easy to answer.  It is simple, and very effective.  How much better to see the person to whom you’re speaking, pick up all the non-verbal cues (often without your noticing).  In addition, it is simple in another way.  There’s no need to dress up as if you are going to work, or out to dinner.  Indeed, what you are wearing below waist level is usual unseen.  The luxury of work conversations while still in your pajama bottoms, or worse, or less!

There are other systems.   I used to Skype, but now I Zoom, mainly because I find the system is more stable.  You can do so much more with technologies like this.  Instead of talking to another using a mobile telephone, this way it is easy to see and share material.  In business meetings, a discussion over a contract can take place with the key sections visible to everyone.  You can examine a graph showing results from a study.  You can assess a marketing campaign.  You can look at a partner’s artwork, or a child’s Lego construction in ‘real time’.

Zooming is like interactive television.  The only barrier is the glass screen, but otherwise you are there.  However, that indicates another feature of Zooming, one that is a little less positive.  Mediated through that screen, you remain one step away from what you are seeing.  You can pick up cues and hints, but you can also avoid them, as the person looking at you is not quite fully connected.  Distanced while Zooming, the moment the session ends, you are no longer engaged:  that moment in your life remains isolated, in a box behind the screen, sufficiently far away that you can remain unaffected.  The illusion of being ‘in touch’ is just that, an appearance, not a reality.  Zooming is quick, total, yet clearly transitory:  arrive quickly and leave just as fast.

One slightly quirky English novelist, Michael Frayn, wrote A Very Private Life in 1968. [iii]  It could have been written today.  It describes a young girl, Uncumber, living in a futuristic world, a world in which the privileged live in a Zoom-like isolation, on drugs, and, unencumbered, in contact only through virtual reality.  She escapes into the real world, to pursue a man she has met virtually.  Love at first sight – literally!  He is from a working class background, and uses drugs to enhance his interactions.  Fairly quickly she abandons him, only to be picked up by the police and placed back into virtual isolation, a medicated life where every emotion exists on tap and the most intimate interaction is sex, which now is experienced alone, lying next to your virtual lover, enjoying private and totally separate hallucinations.  Will we move on from Zooming to living in a virtual ‘brave new world’, our drugged consciousness full of artificial ‘life experiences’?

Perhaps a rather more familiar example comes from Pixar’s 2008 movie, WALL-E.  One of the strengths of Pixar is that the company often makes films that are both entertaining while also thought provoking.  Up was a funny, improbably adventure story, while also a reflection on ageing and loss.  Inside Out was a remarkable perspective on youngsters (and parents) coping with the conflicting emotions and desires that sweep through the young as they go through adolescence and grow up. [iv]   However, WALL-E is possibly the most remarkable of all.  Set in the future, it imagines a world in which climate change, consumerism and environmental neglect have destroyed the earth, and human survivors have been evacuated on to giant space craft.  After some hundreds of years the passengers have degenerated into helpless corpulence, each attended by machines, each transported on his or her own robotic support system.  A dark vision, despite a great deal of humour in the telling, only relieved by an improbable turnaround in the last few minutes (necessary to get the film released, I would guess).

How did this film get received: “Parents need to know that although this winning Pixar adventure is thoroughly charming and, yes, romantic, the youngest viewers may get a little restless during WALL-E‘s atmospheric, virtually dialogue-free first half-hour. They’ll still enjoy it, but — unlike older kids and grown-ups — they won’t be that impressed by how much is said with so few words. But the action (which includes some robot fights, weapons being fired, explosions, and chase scenes) picks up soon enough. Underlying the whole thing are strong environmental messages: Reduce, reuse, recycle, and think about what you’re doing to the planet (and yourself).” [v]  Yes,  but I have to hope that parents who watched it got a lot more than that, as hopefully they did from Up and Inside Out, too.

These three extraordinary films from Pixar achieve something that is quite remarkable.  At one level, they are movies for children, with plenty of drama, excitement and even violence, but safely contained, behind a screen and in a world of animated characters, however realistic they might appear.  At another level, especially for older viewers, they are an invitation to analyse and think.  They’re not instructional, as so many non-fiction films can be, nor do they promote many answers, although they cannot help doing some of that.  When I am on my upswing in thinking about people, I imagine many viewers feel uncomfortable, concerned, even asking themselves how they can reduce waste, care for older relatives, and help children through the emotional challenges of growing up.  On my down cycle, I fear the adults just laugh as their children do.

Why Zoom?  Talking to family, friends and colleagues around the world, there’s immediacy, more intimacy, in a conversation on the screen.  I can’t be in London, Hong Kong, Melbourne or Sydney when I am in the USA. [vi]  We can tell stories, laugh and joke, as well as getting into more serious topics.  Not in the same room, but close.  Zooming has become a new normal.

Zooming has removed one of the barriers to communication we often forget.  Many years ago and living in Australia, there were two ways I could be in touch with my parents in the UK.  I could write, and my mother was an excellent correspondent, letters several pages long, with news, anecdotes and insights.  I would like to claim I wrote back in the same way:  alas I was a poor correspondent.  The alternative was the telephone.  However, back then long-distance calls were expensive, and we would only make a call if there was some kind of pressing emergency.

By the turn of the century, such quaint systems had largely disappeared.  Email had largely replaced letter writing.  It was quicker, cheaper, and easier.  Expensive ISDN long-distance telephone calls were replaced by calls over the Internet (Voice Over Internet Protocol, VOIP).  Sneaky telephone companies still charged higher rates for long-distance calls using VOIP but inevitably upstart challenges started offering a rental fee for an Internet line, and no charge for the calls made.  Eventually most providers moved to adopting the new telephone calling system.  Only in the USA, a surprisingly backward country when it comes to Internet access and telephony, are providers still trying to charge for calls with a premium for distance.  Finally, as video compression systems improved in quality and speed, so we found ourselves being able to Skype, Facetime and Zoom.  Communication isn’t just faster.  It is almost instantaneous, except for that occasionally annoying tiny time lag between London and Melbourne, for example.

Let me slow down for a moment!  What happened when email replaced letters?  The time involved in communicating suddenly became much shorter.  As that happened, the time to think was reduced.  An email arrives, and you can – and often do – respond quickly.  Need to get in touch or advise a colleague, email is better, quicker.  Two consequences became apparent.  The first was in the text of the email, the spelling and grammar!  Off went an email, with minor errors often unnoticed, both by the sender and the receiver.  Purists bemoaned the decline of skills in use of the English language (in all languages), but things were fast, as we were zooming along!

The second consequence was the more important (well, in some ways).  Email nibbled away at the time put into consideration, to examining the topic, the plan, the request.  I wonder how many billions of emails raced through cyberspace with thinly analysed responses:  “Yes.” “No.” “Count me in.” “Price agreed.” “Great strategy.  Let’s do it.”  Quite apart from the mistakes made, these immediate responses changed communication in another way.  They made many interactions task-oriented, often ignoring individual, emotional, even human feelings.  Email depersonalised millions of interactions in business, and even more broadly.  As I mentioned in another blog, the title of Marshall McLuhan’s book The Medium is the Massage was correct (in fact, an error in typesetting, the title should have included ‘Message’, but as soon as he saw it, McLuhan endorsed the change).  The ‘message’ of email was not just in the text, though that was important too, but in the cyberspace medium, it was a brain massage, confirming that responding quickly was what mattered.  Emails took away much thinking: rather than deciding to think an issue through, the pressure to respond often pushed any time for consideration to one side.

Why Zoom?  Hasn’t this taken us past that impersonal world of email, and brought us back to people interacting, with space and time to see emotions and reactions.  Zoom is human.  We can see the other person.  We can talk things through.  Except face-to-face interaction is much more than that. “The knowledge work pursued in many modern offices—thinking, investigating, synthesizing, writing, planning, organizing, and so on—tends to be fuzzy and disorganized compared to the structured processes of, say, industrial manufacturing. In many offices, tasks are assigned haphazardly, and there are few systematic ways to track who is working on what or find out how the work is going. In such a chaotic work environment, there are profound advantages to gathering people together in one place.” [vii]  We’re not AI-enabled robots!  To add to that, the ritual of going to work allows for mental preparation, a necessary task distinguishing between professional and personal life. As many socially distanced home workers are now discovering, being at work requires some rituals and a degree of separation.

I fear Zoom is another step along the road where we live our lives mediated through digital interfaces, apart and alone, managed by commercial enterprises ‘on our behalf’.  Science fiction takes what we know and extends it into an imagined future:  A Very Private Life and WALL-E portray a world getting closer all the time: to Zoom is easy and effective, and that’s the problem.

Z is or Zooming marks the end of my alphabetic blogs, but I have a new theme to keep me moving along.  However, I plan to stick with writing; I won’t be zooming if I can avoid it.

[i] Zoom, Xoom, Zum: Why Does Every Start-Up Sound Fast Now? Erin Griffiths, New York Times, May 7, 2020

[ii] I could have asked about security, but would be another blog.  See Schumpeter in The Economist, 20 June 2020

[iii] William Collins, 1968

[iv] Released in 2009 and 2015 respectively.

[v] https://www.commonsensemedia.org/movie-reviews/wall-e

[vi] And while the coronavirus pandemic continues, I’m very unlikely to hop on an aeroplane to see them

[vii] Cal Newport, Why Remote Work Is So Hard—and How It Can Be Fixed, The New Yorker, May 26, 2020

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