Three years ago, the political analyst and South Korea expert Robert Kelly was giving a live interview on the BBC, via videoconference, from his home office in Busan, when his two young children barged into the room. The pair—a jauntily assertive, glasses-wearing preschooler and a baby who skittered in, as if propelled by a mysterious force, on a wheeled walker—were pursued and eventually apprehended by their frantic mother, who, on her hands and knees, hustled the saboteurs out and pulled the office door shut. The video quickly went viral, but I had forgotten about it until recently, when the videoconferencing service Zoom, and the circumstances under which I and many others had begun to use it, reminded me of Kelly’s thin smile and his wife’s desperately grappling arms.
As the coronavirus pandemic made its rapid and implacable advance across the United States, forcing sweeping closures of schools and workplaces and bringing about the disappearance of any type of collective, real-world activity, it became obvious that a new era had begun. With millions of Americans self-quarantining for the foreseeable future, Zoom became, seemingly overnight, not only a professional lifeline but also a way of life. Suddenly, we couldn’t see anyone in person, but everyone appeared to be seeing one another on Zoom—at college lectures and in elementary-school P.E. classes, at cardio-kickboxing training and on kindergarten playdates. Some nights, after spying screenshots posted on social media of acquaintances raising glasses during a virtual cocktail party, one might experience Zoom FOMO. Other evenings, one navigated conflicting Zoom plans. “I have two friends I watch a movie with, and now I have to push that to another day because of a surprise birthday party,” a friend told me.
Being confined to our homes, often with roommates or family members or pets, and having no clear separation between work and leisure, has given rise to a culture whose weirdness Zoom has made particularly legible. Nowadays, we are all Robert Kelly. In an article in the Times, Brian X. Chen provided Zoom-specific etiquette tips: “Our families are more important than anyone, but that doesn’t mean our colleagues want to see our partners in their bathrobes, our cats sitting on keyboards or our children throwing toys.” On the Cut, Lizzie Post, Emily Post’s great-great-granddaughter, weighed in on inappropriate Zoom behavior. Drinking coffee or tea during a meeting is fine, but, she warned, “avoid slurping”; she, too, vetoed bathrobes. On NPR’s “All Things Considered,” the USA Today columnist Steven Petrow said, bluntly, “If you need to go to the bathroom . . . turn off the video. Turn off the audio, because sound is louder than you think.”
As I encountered these well-meaning suggestions, I felt a resistance rising within me. Surely the haste with which we have had to adjust to the new reality—and the insistence with which the human element tends to insert itself into the supposedly seamless world of technology—makes it inevitable that Zoom, like life itself, will be chaotic. And, although I might be more interested than most in seeing colleagues in bathrobes and cats on keyboards, or hearing a co-worker’s surprisingly noisy peeing, I also suspect that embracing rather than rejecting this chaos would be a gain even for those less prying than me. As long as we’re living in a trying time, why pretend otherwise? At a moment when the stakes of real-life unpredictability are deadly serious, Zoom is a space in which to safely welcome unpredictability and looser boundaries.
I’ve found that even the most subtle shifts that Zoom brings about have the power to jar and fascinate. On my first-ever video call on the platform—could it have been only in mid-March?—my husband and I spoke to our financial adviser. On the occasions we’d seen him in the past, he had been fully suited, sitting in his spare, corporate office in a lower-Manhattan high-rise, where an assistant offered us coffee and half-sized bottles of mineral water. Working from home, he was dressed in a lightweight button-down shirt. It happened to be a beautiful day, and the window behind him was open, and framed by soft, cream-colored curtains that appeared to sway slightly in the breeze. During the conversation, I felt myself mentally latching onto those curtains, which, as we spoke of the economic crisis and how it might affect my husband’s and my retirement plan, seemed to throw the formal discussion we were having into a more leisurely context. Had the financial adviser absconded to a south-of-the-border resort with our meagre savings, my husband, who had also noticed the lightweight shirt and the swaying curtains, wondered jokingly, once the call was over? Did he have a salt-rimmed margarita waiting just beyond the view of his computer’s camera? This was extremely unlikely, but it wasn’t totally impossible, and the notion opened up a vista. Zoom was providing us with more clues than ever before with which to figure out, or at least to imagine, what people might be doing in their more private lives—what they might really be like.
As a young child, in the early nineteen-eighties, I had a board book in which an illustration that was meant to signify “the future” showed a bespectacled, smiling man speaking with a bespectacled, smiling woman, or, rather, with her image, on a TV-like contraption. The videophone seemed to me a hardly conceivable invention—a thing one might encounter only on space-age shows like “The Jetsons” and “Star Trek.” Then, suddenly, in the early two-thousands, Skype entered the mass market. I had recently moved to the U.S., to attend graduate school, and I used the platform to speak to family and friends back home, in Israel, feeling amazed at our ability to see rather than just hear one another, but also resigned to the lo-fi glitchiness of the communication, the lags and distortions that often made the whole endeavor seem not worth the trouble. In the years that followed, several new services for videoconferencing emerged: Cisco Webex, Google Hangouts, FaceTime, WhatsApp, and, in 2016, Houseparty, which allows users to join their friends’ private chats if granted permission—a feature that gives the app a rollicking, vaguely louche air.
Zoom was founded in 2011, by Eric S. Yuan, a Chinese-born engineer who is the company’s C.E.O., and it has been on the market since 2013. In 2017, Zoom’s valuation reached a billion dollars, and it hit sixteen billion when the company went public, in April, 2019. The service was a success story, but it was mostly used by remote workers at companies like Uber. Less than a year later, when the coronavirus pandemic hit, Zoom became the fastest-growing videoconferencing service in the world. The number of daily users jumped from ten million last December to two hundred million in late March. The company is now worth more than forty billion dollars. On the service’s basic plan, a meeting can include up to a hundred people and costs nothing if kept to under forty minutes. Zoom’s plan for educational institutions normally starts at eighteen hundred dollars annually, but, since the outbreak of the virus, Yuan has made the service free to all K-12 schools in countries including the U.S., Japan, and Italy—a generous decision that seems to have contributed to the service’s skyrocketing popularity. The estimated number of daily downloads, which averaged fifty-six thousand in January, was 2.13 million on March 23rd alone.
Jake Saper, a partner at the venture-capital firm Emergence, Zoom’s first Silicon Valley-based institutional investor, explained, “A videoconferencing application is that rare tool where everyone, from my grandma to my rabbi, can tell immediately how well it’s operating. If it’s lagging by one second, the user notices.” According to Saper, Zoom’s “underlying code makes the user feel like there’s no distance between him and the person he’s talking to.” Zoom’s design is also appealingly basic. The “gallery view” mode, which arranges participants in “Hollywood Squares”-style tiles, has the somewhat dated appeal of graph paper, suggesting a stodgy reliability. The “active speaker view” mode—in which a single enlarged window is given to whoever is currently speaking, granting all users the sense of being poised for a closeup by an unseen cameraman—is only a touch more exciting. There is a mute function—an option that many will likely come to miss once face-to-face meetings resume—and participants can choose a virtual background to block their environment from view. They can also share their screen with other users (whether for the purpose of PowerPoint tutorials or word games, memes or YouTube videos), and a chat box is available for real-time written communication—which, not unlike passing notes in class, feels a little illicit.
Zoom has taken to presenting itself almost as a utility company, akin to National Grid or Con Ed. “In this together,” the tagline on the Zoom Web site now reads. “Keeping you securely connected wherever you are.” Indeed, it has sometimes seemed to me that, in the absence of a quick and coherent governmental intervention in the coronavirus crisis, the dependably achieved, tech-enabled community Zoom promises is one of the only things many Americans feel they have to lean on. Zoom’s user-friendliness, however, has come with some drawbacks. Because the platform does not require that users log in, it is vulnerable to so-called Zoombombing, in which trolls appear in strangers’ meetings, sometimes disseminating graphic content through the shared-screen option. (This troubling practice nevertheless led to the following winning sentence in the Times: “Chipotle was forced to end a public Zoom chat that the brand had co-hosted with the musician Lauv after one participant began broadcasting pornography to hundreds of attendees.”)
On March 26th, a journalist for Motherboard revealed that Zoom was using software that shared customers’ data with Facebook. (In response, Zoom removed the software.) On March 30th, the Times reported, the New York attorney general, Letitia James, sent a letter to Zoom to ask what measures it was planning to put in place to protect its surging customer base from hacker attacks and malicious third-party users seeking to gain access to people’s Webcams. (Zoom replied in a statement that the company appreciated James’s “engagement,” and noted that it was “happy to provide her with the requested information.”) In April, the New York City Department of Education announced that it would prohibit teachers from using Zoom to communicate with their students, owing to privacy issues. (No immediate timeline has been given. As of this writing, my eight-year-old daughter’s Brooklyn public school is still using Zoom.)
It has yet to be seen whether the service will successfully address its critics’ concerns. In the meantime, I have continued to welcome Zoom’s gentler forms of chaos. In a recent cooking demonstration hosted by the women’s club the Wing, the cookbook author Alison Roman made sardine pasta and lemon tea cake for an audience of three thousand homebound fans. Roman, who was self-quarantining at a friend’s house in Hudson, New York, was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, and nattered and cooked as viewers exchanged thoughts and questions in the chat sidebar at a pace that bordered on frenzied. Every now and again, Roman would apologize for fumbling her cell phone as she attempted to move it to focus on a generously buttered cake tin or a simmering pan—her face suddenly disappearing or emerging in extreme closeup, or the floor or a wall unexpectedly coming into view. “This is some relatable blair witch project energy,” one viewer wrote. “We out here just enjoying the realness,” another commented.
Users tend to fondly recall such moments of Zoom disorder. A Twitter acquaintance told me that, while videoconferencing with his boss, he realized that his two dogs were humping behind him. A professor said that, as he was teaching his students a passage from the essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” by the queer literary critic Leo Bersani, the professor’s wife could be heard laughing—she was watching the reality dating show “Love Island” just off camera. Another professor, teaching his first class on Zoom, fell down the stairs in his house while attempting to locate an elusive Wi-Fi signal. A colleague shared a photo of her uncle, a middle-school math teacher, giving a lesson with his laptop propped on his kitchen table atop an economy package of paper towels. One writer told me that, during a Zoom interview with a fashion designer, an unstable connection transformed their voices “into a terrifying, dystopian robot howl talking about quilted jackets.” And a friend said she’d attempted to hold a Zoom dance party but had a hard time synching the music, creating a poignant lag between households.
I was told by one woman that she and her partner accidentally Zoombombed a stranger’s private exercise class, after getting the scheduled time of their own class wrong. “We rolled out our yoga mats, put the laptop on a chair, and logged in to the link,” she said. “But there was this other woman there already with the teacher. She looked at me and said, ‘There’s someone in here!’ ” The snafu, the woman said, “made me feel alive.” Meanwhile, a colleague told me that the only thing that has made her laugh lately are the bizarre backgrounds she and her friends have been concocting on Zoom. My daughter and I, after trying out the platform’s standard backgrounds, including an idyllic image of the Golden Gate Bridge and an outsized rendering of blades of grass, uploaded our own background: a closeup image of the sleeping face of our ginger cat, Gingy. When, during a conversation with a friend, Gingy walked into the frame, I scooped him up, and the friend took a screenshot of us. The resulting image was not unlike a Dada collage—the real and its representation collapsing, palimpsest-like, into each other, with the laughing faces of my daughter and me sandwiched in between the two.
In some situations, it is preferable that Zoom not be a vector for random bloopers and odd juxtapositions. Dating has been hit hard by the onset of the coronavirus, and apps and experts have come up with strategies to help single people adapt during self-isolation. In late March, Hinge announced that it had partnered with Zoom to create special backgrounds, featuring “popular date spots, such as the bar, the park, and the beach,” to make each date feel less like a conference call and more like “the beginning of a romantic journey.” Another dating app, Ship, asks users to add a “#DFH” badge to their profile, to indicate that they are ready to “date from home.” Marni Battista, an L.A.-based dating and relationship coach, quickly devised a new code of behavior for her clients. Proffering a Zoom link to a potential date, she said, can be a way to advance a texting relationship at a time when an in-person meeting is off the table. “We call it ‘throwing the Zoom hankie,’ ” she said. “Throwing out the possibility of Zoom and seeing if the man picks it up.” The impossibility of actual sex, Battista explained, is a boon for many women who are seeking a more serious relationship. “People who are swiping on the apps just for hookups—there’s no payoff for them now,” she told me. Battista is advising her clients to mimic the atmosphere of a real date as closely as possible: to get dressed up, to order delivery from the same restaurant, to watch a movie together using Netflix’s Party plug-in, which allows viewers to interact in a chat box throughout, or to visit an aquarium for a shared virtual tour. “When you do something with someone for the first time, it creates a connection,” she told me.
Katie Liptak, a twenty-two-year-old editorial assistant who left New York in mid-March to quarantine at her parents’ home, in Washington, D.C., recently scheduled a Zoom date, for which she and her love interest ordered the same kind of pizza and bottle of wine. (“We Cloroxed it down,” she said.) “I spent an incredibly long time dressing up for it, and I tried to be strategic about what would look good from the waist up,” she told me. “At one point, I almost did the ‘America’s Next Top Model’ trick where you put a binder clip on the back of your top to make it more well fitting, but I was afraid that I would turn around and he would see.” The date was fun, and Liptak was considering a follow-up on Zoom; still, it was a strange experience. “It’s a sense of removal that reminds you of a Jane Austen novel,” she said. The fact that the date took place in her childhood bedroom, three feet from her parents’ room, was also peculiar. Plus, she wasn’t sure where a relationship could go under these new circumstances. “Sexting is something that me and my friends think about as something that you do after you’ve already had sex,” she said. “Then again, we don’t know how long this is going to last. We might need to change the way we act.”
The lack of physical presence can’t be completely solved—not even by Zoom. Not long ago, I attended a life-drawing class hosted on Zoom by the artist Alex Schmidt, who also serves as the class model. Schmidt, a visual-art M.F.A. candidate at Hunter College, told me that she was refusing to take part in Zoom classes that her program was holding in lieu of in-person teaching, and signed a letter to the school’s president asking for a refund or a pause on the semester. “Zoom art classes are not an adequate substitute,” she said. “We’re talking about something that’s so removed from the thing itself.”
Nevertheless, Schmidt still enjoys running her own, less formal class remotely. Before the quarantine, the class took place once a month at various New York City locations, but since March 18th Schmidt has held it twice a week, with a suggested donation of fifteen dollars; it is open to “womxn, trans, queer, nb, and gnc friends,” and “the rare vetted cis het man . . . with my permission <3.” In the class I attended, on a recent Monday afternoon, she disrobed and went through a series of poses of different lengths, from one minute to ten, sometimes holding a prop—a kettlebell, a lamp—while nearly thirty women observed her body closely.
I, too, was drawing, and as I did so I began to notice Schmidt’s awareness and use of Zoom’s constraints, coming closer to the laptop camera to highlight a certain body part, or moving farther back to reveal the full span of her arms and legs. This made her body seem variously truncated or expansive, not unlike the photographs of stubby but sprawling dolls taken by the Surrealist artist Hans Bellmer, in the nineteen-thirties. I also felt my attention turning to the other students. Arranged in Zoom’s gallery view, they seemed worthy of observation as well, and I attempted to capture them in my sketches: one woman drew alongside her five-year-old daughter; another leaned over a sheet of paper on the floor with a cat nuzzling in her lap; a third sat on a sofa, in a black hat, with a sketch pad on her knees. I thought of something I had read online the week before: that the coronavirus pandemic would halt in fourteen days if all of us could freeze in place, six feet away from one another. Here was Zoom, expressing this reality in its own way, if only for a brief time, rendering its atomized subjects into an almost perfect still-life. ♦
A Guide to the Coronavirus
- How to practice social distancing, from responding to a sick housemate to the pros and cons of ordering food.
- How the coronavirus behaves inside of a patient.
- Can survivors help cure the disease and rescue the economy?
- The long crusade of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the infectious-disease expert pinned between Donald Trump and the American people.
- The success of Hong Kong and Singapore in stemming the spread holds lessons for how to contain it in the United States.
- The coronavirus is likely to spread for more than a year before a vaccine is widely available.
- With each new virus, we have scrambled for a new treatment. Can we prepare antivirals to combat the next global crisis?
- How pandemics have propelled public-health innovations, prefigured revolutions, and redrawn maps.
- What to read, watch, cook, and listen to under coronavirus quarantine.
