Issue 1: Zooming Through

I do a quick hair check as I begin every Zoom meeting, sometimes covertly raising a hand to straighten my Mia Wallace bangs or, on humid days, giving up altogether and nonchalantly swiping them to the side. Back in April, Stanford researchers published quantitative findings indicating that so-called “Zoom fatigue” affects women more than men, primarily due to the ‘self view’ feature whose design forces us to look at ourselves for what is, for me, an eight-hour work day spent videoconferencing my way through back-to-back meetings. Am I experiencing an early mid-life mirror stage? Or is the Zoom boom and its resulting exhaustion just another form of digital narcissism?

In March of 2020, while IT departments scrambled to install videoconferencing software and establish VPN connections for those of us privileged enough to work from home, we  become metaphorical cam girls overnight, performing our terrified professional selves for one another in what has become the longest haul of our lives. It seemed a bit fun — for a few weeks, at least — to locate oneself in an on-screen sea of tiny boxes, each containing a friend, colleague, loved one, or utter stranger as was the case in the seemingly-endless stream of Zoom cocktail parties, raves, karaoke sessions, and other indicators of the class divide that quickly emerged between those for whom the pandemic could be made to feel like a party and those for whom it could not. Some leaned into Zoom for dear life, organizing digital events while clinging to the platform and its functional possibilities as a means of maintaining social capital in the absence of real-life encounters. The “Zoom grid” became a point of obsession in aesthetic discourse. 

Writing about the pandemic’s uncanny relationship to modernist aesthetics for The Atlantic in April 2020, Spencer Kornhaber observes: “On Zoom calls, you see the varied fashions and faces and postures that mark human individuality—but it’s all flattened to 2-D and sliced into a matrix. On level after level, the pandemic has gridded, added symmetry, and buffed difference. Life now feels designed.” Zoom fatigue is a design problem, one that has been clearly identified but remains yet to be solved by Big Tech. (Why change the produce when the company’s market shares have shot through the roof?) 

As a social phenomenon, however, Zoom fatigue is perhaps more insidious and intractable than the screen obsession so thoroughly analyzed by the likes of social scientist and MIT scholar Sherry Turkle, whose psychoanalytically-informed analysis of digital culture warns us of the ill social effects of our engagement with technology.