It was all those faces, the faces staring back. Not scary faces. Not ugly ones. But so many of them on my laptop screen, all at once. Through lockdown I had successfully avoided getting dragged into too many Zoom sessions, only dipping into this online world when I had to or wanted to. This is one of the few privileges of the stay-at-home self-employed worker.
But it finally hit me, probably several months after everybody else: the weird, surreal nonsense of the online “meeting” (and yes, I insist on those quotation marks).
All those boxes on the screen. It reminded me of Celebrity Squares, a popular game show from the 1970s which had a short-lived revival in the early 1990s. But while there had been some sort of interaction between the (minor) stars sitting up there in the TV studio, on the Zoom screen the faces are all isolated, sealed off, disconnected. There is little meaningful intercourse of any kind. You can try to think (or speak) outside the box, but the technology is against you. It appears to be bringing people together, but in fact makes us less human.
I want to go to a real meeting again, with people in the same non-virtual room at the same time. To sit round a table, or in the audience for a talk. Or even to give a talk. I want to tut, roll my eyes, and harrumph. (Have you ever heard me harrumph? You should.) I want to laugh, and make others laugh, even intentionally. I want to unmute myself.
These are the classic and predictable sentiments of the frustrated extrovert. For others the Zoom “meeting” may not feel quite so limiting or oppressive. Finally some peace and permission to sit there in silence, pretending to listen. Not so good, though, for mansplainers, for whom the online gathering is a disaster. Recent research by the consultancy Eden McCallum found an interesting gender split, between men, who seemed to feel stymied by the etiquette of online discussions, and women, who were less troubled by it and found that for once they could get a few words in.
These can, of course, sound like white collar, bourgeois concerns. In the UK only 32 per cent of workers are still carrying out all their professional tasks at home. Others have been “encouraged” to go back into offices or other workplaces even when it has not been safe for them to do so. But this new reality has been experienced in some form by most of us.
After a year of Zoom and other similar formats we have woken up to the limitations of the ersatz “meeting.” “Video conferencing can actually reduce collective intelligence,” writes Anita Williams Woolley, associate professor of organisational behaviour and theory at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business in Pittsburgh. “This is because it leads to more unequal contribution to conversation and disrupts vocal ‘synchrony.’” Words matter more than the pictures, and some of these Zoom/Teams sessions might work better with no cameras running, making it… a traditional conference call. Still crap, but slightly less crap than what’s currently being inflicted on everybody.
I’m not a Luddite, honestly. I’ve got a smart phone and a Spotify account (well, the family one that my wife sorted out). There have obviously been some gains out of this enforced working from home experiment. A lot of wasteful commuting time and travel has been avoided. At last there has been some real flexibility for a lot more people. Almost 90 per cent of Grant Thornton’s UK workforce say they want to work from home most of the time. Overall, more than two-thirds of UK employees want to retain some of the new-found flexibility, according to a survey from Microsoft. It is not all good news, however. Some 20 per cent feel that their company doesn’t care about their work-life balance, while 57 per cent feel “overworked” and 47 per cent are “exhausted.”
What we do need, quite urgently, is (safe) human contact. This—how we have been living and working in the past year—is not normal. I am sceptical about some of the claims made about increased productivity in this time of lockdown. Perhaps some people have been crossing off lists quite steadily, and saving on commuting time to finish work earlier. But what about all the ideas that have not been shared, the creative discussions that have not been possible online, which would have developed and flowed naturally if people had been in the same place at the same time? There must be a lot of things that have not been produced along with all the other things that have been.
Are there grounds for optimism? There are signs we will be able to recover a lot of our creativity quite quickly once we are working together more normally again. Research carried out in Scotland last summer showed that attention levels, learning ability and working memory all improved rapidly once lockdown restrictions were eased.
Until then we will have “team meetings,” using software called Teams, hoping (pretending?) that we are still functioning as a team. I doubt we can go on much longer like this. Everyone has their breaking point, don’t they? This is mine. Who knows when one more day of back-to-back Zoom “meetings” will push us to emulate Howard Beale, the news anchor gone mad in the 1976 film Network, who memorably completely loses it one night live on national television.
As Beale puts it: “I’m a human being, God damn it, my life has value!... I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this any more!”
