How is Zoom changing us?

I Google, “How is Zoom changing us?” and a series of search results about how to transform your background into a beach in Bali or psychedelic cats comes up. I scroll, looking for anything that gets to deeper existential questions I’m starting to have, but I can’t find it. I decide that is an answer in and of itself. 

How is Zoom changing us? I don’t know. 

I know that the very first time my six year-old had a live Zoom class, she sobbed immediately afterward. We sat on the bottom of her bunk bed, my neck crunched, and I wrapped my arms around her. “I miss my friends,” she wailed. And I said, “I know. I know. Me too.” 

Zoom makes us miss our friends. 

It’s not that we can’t see them. We can. They’re in the little boxes on the screen. In some cases, we are even “seeing” more of some friends than we did during the before times. Our lives are smaller, our weak ties have withered; in the place of all that water cooler serendipity is an intentionality that has led to something deeper. High school friends are reuniting and extended far flung families are creating new weekly traditions. 

I attended a gathering in which I got to witness one very pregnant woman’s whole constellation of beloveds, showering her with well wishes for the journey into motherhood from all points of the nation. On the one hand, that journey has become infinitely more lonely because she did it in the time of COVID; on the other hand, she never would have been loved on in quite that way--so borderless, so ritualistic--if it weren’t for these weird times.

Still, it’s not the same. I let myself imagine the first 15 minutes of my women’s group as it used to gather. Someone walks in with a gorgeous salad--greens and deep reds and bright oranges and a dressing that smells like a Persian market; someone else notices it, praises it, takes it from her hands and sets it on the serving table, giving her a huge, long hug. They make a little noise as they hug, like a dog finding a comfortable spot on a couch. Someone opens a bottle of Malbec and offers a glass to a beleaguered latecomer; they bond over sleep deprivation and mansplaining co-workers. Someone cuts the chicken off the bone, knowing I’m terrible at it. Someone laughs til they cry and someone else comes over to see what’s so funny. I can’t get anyone’s attention to get the evening started. The windows fog up. We push the tables together. It’s perfect.

I had no idea how perfect.  

I guess what I’m trying to say is seeing your friends is not the same as seeing your friends. Even a six year-old knows that. Especially, a six year-old knows that. Seeing your people is a visceral experience--it’s about the texture of a person’s sweater, their heat, their vibes; it’s a hand on an arm, a guffaw unmediated by technology’s tinny assistance, a crust of bread, eyes filled with salty tears you can practically smell. 

Meanwhile, we are seeing ourselves more in this strange Hollywood Squares universe we’ve come to inhabit. In work meetings, in class Zooms, in online dance parties--our own likeness stares back at us. I hardly look in mirrors. It’s never been my thing, but especially after having kids; who has time for it? I’m the queen of low maintenance everything. But now, it’s like I’m constantly looking at my own face (note: my husband/copy editor just informed me that you can, indeed, hide yourself. Sharing in case anyone else is as clueless as I am.)   

Pretty typical Zoom Court.

I watch my daughter, watching herself when she is supposed to be doing something else kids do in first grade. She tilts her head this way and that. She twists up her lips. She sneaks her stuffed animal into the frame and makes it dance. How will this change her--this daily experience of watching herself? I’m 40. I’ve spent a lifetime learning while either not thinking about how I look or only thinking about how I look insofar as I am projecting what the cute guy who sits three rows behind me sees when he sees me--not exactly a virtuous exercise, but a pretty creative, unknowable one. How do I keep my girl from becoming a Zoom narcissus?

A friend suggested to me that Zoom levels the social status of a group--whoever you are, whatever degrees or professional role or money in your bank account--you get the same sized box on the screen. I like that. We are all watched and we are all watching. No panopticon here. And it can be pretty damn delightful to get a real sense of where and how people actually live, who they live among. I feel as if I have an actual relationship with one collaborator’s father, not because I’ve ever spoken to him, but simply because I’ve admired the way he trudges around her backyard during our Zoom calls, with that sense of purposeful aimlessness befitting a man his age in overalls. I love seeing people’s bookshelves, their tchotchkes, their children.

But then again, the size of the box is not tantamount to the space you take up. I watch the same guys who talk too much in real life filling the chat box with their hot takes on just about everything. The kids who have to be reminded to keep their hands to themselves are now the ones who unmute themselves haphazardly and interrupt the teacher’s flow. Entitlement and dysfunction finds a way of shapeshifting in two dimensions. Wherever we go, here we still (virtually) are. We take our unconsciousness with us. 

I don’t know, guys. I’m sure there are studies on all this. Or if they don’t already exist, they will soon. I don’t need the studies to know that when 5pm hits and I close this laptop and my four year-old runs through the front door and lays her grubby little hands on me, it feels fundamental. The texture of her has always been sacred to me, but these days, amid all these flat boxes, her round idiosyncrasies keep me human.

How do you think Zoom is changing us? How do you stay human?