Our pandemic boosted video conferencing from niche pursuit for corporate suits and Facetiming teens into mainstream mania.
Video conferencing – Skype, Microsoft Teams and that megalith Zoom – floated schools and universities, businesses and non-profits through the hazy early days of lockdown uncertainty. It sustains them still.
What’s more, it’s gone social. Without video conferencing, book clubs may have withered. So, too, choirs. Friends groups. Dining clubs. Family reunions. Even blind dates.
For proof, look to Zoom’s transition from proper name to lower-case vernacular. “Hey, zoom me.”
So, while video conferencing has brought no antidote against the coronavirus, it has soothed our loneliness.
Yet we want more.
Video conferencing works well for meetings and lectures where information flows mainly one way, where tradition choreographs speaking order, or where hierarchy controls the “mute” key.
For social gatherings, it’s sterile, inorganic. In Zoom, individuals talk or listen. They don’t break naturally into smaller groups, then move and mix, then mix again. Zoom flattens our interactions into two dimensions. It squelches happenstance. It discourages serendipity.
So, thank goodness for Zoom.
But, please, Zoom. Be gone.
Again
Wow! I enjoyed the UC Baton Rouge Choir’s rendering of Do Na Nobis Pacem. I especially liked the voice of that guy in the center of the choir members. He reminds me of the good old days in a choir I once belonged to. I had a singing buddy there who was my good friend. I miss him.
Phil
Phil, thank you! Thanks for listening. Singing alone in my apartment isn’t half so fun as singing in person, but it beats not singing at all.