Can you hear me?
This plea, one that I can rarely remember asking before last March, has become something of a daily mantra for everyone stuck on Zoom for the duration of the pandemic. Almost a year has passed since in-person life was suddenly benched, yet the same issues persist.
You just cut out.
Sorry, my camera isn’t working.
You’re on mute.
Audio is fuzzy. Cameras flicker on and off for seemingly no reason. Internet connection becomes unstable, causing voices to cut out or mechanically slur. Words echo endlessly until no one can tell what is being said anymore. Taken as a whole, Zoom turns any average social interaction into a comedy of errors laced with an eerie level of disconnection that, if anything, drives people further apart.
The crux of why Zoom is so alienating is that it removes all possibility of spontaneity from human interaction. When speaking in a group, there are countless nonverbal cues that direct the conversation. Personally, I click my tongue quietly before I’m about to speak. It’s an unconscious action that the people around me pick up on, so they know I’m going to talk before I even start. Virtual calls create an inevitable delay between speaking and being heard, which means that any group interaction where discussion is not wholly structured results in participants talking over one another, as cues that one is about to speak are received seconds after they are made. This makes for frustrating conversations that stretch into lengthy silences while people assess whose turn it is. Structured conversations, though they mitigate a great deal of the chaos a free-for-all entails, are not much better. The process of raising a hand is already a hassle ‒ the most common options being raising a hand in the participants section or physically raising one’s hand on camera, neither of which are guaranteed to attract attention. This has been made better by Zoom’s newest update, which raises the user’s hand in the corner of their video, and pushes them to the top of the screen. Yet this can still be missed, and the constant shuffling of cameras can make participants difficult to track.
Cameras present an entirely different set of issues. I have had no end of troubles with my camera, an integrated webcam that Zoom insists doesn’t exist the majority of the time. When I am unable to turn my video on, I feel even more disconnected from my peers. I am unable to engage in the pantomime of virtual engagement, nodding and smiling to make the speaker feel heard. Having my camera on tends to be even worse. I am almost incapable of watching anyone except for myself on camera. Zoom turns us all into a modern-day Narcissus, obsessed with checking our own image to make sure we don’t look ridiculous on camera. Being able to see yourself reflected adds a layer of self-consciousness to every event, meaning each participant either forces themselves to maintain a charade of a “Zoom-smile,” or else see themselves (always pinned at the top of their screen) in a dead-eyed stare. Yet the narcissistic image-checking seems more bearable than the voyeurism of watching other people present themselves to the camera.
What all of these social and technical issues have in common is simple: they add an unnecessary layer of hassle to interactions that used to be effortless. Even though each step requires only an additional button press or two, it adds up to countless superfluous actions that must be mentally accounted for when speaking to or engaging with others. This creates a barrier between people that is impossible to ignore. It’s exhausting. It has entered us into the era of Zoom Gothic, where every typical day becomes a draining cycle of alienation and error. And, after all of this, you are still on mute.
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