TRAFFIC

TRAFFIC by Alma Reyes

ZOOM IN OR ZOOM OUT

Camera ready? Mic on? Volume up? Good background? Fresh makeup? Unstained shirt? Lights, camera, action! Yes, you’ve just been “ZOOMed” in. The world is staring at you. But, there’s no director, no line prompter, no props man, and no location shooting—just you, your private corner, and a dozen tiny faces in pixelated boxes.

For many of us relying on constant Internet feeding and addictive social media while enduring the long-standing pandemic that is frantically working so hard to shelter us within our walls, our computer screen is behaving bit strangely these days. It’s crawling with rows of tiny frames of jiggling faces next to each other, like sitting inside a production control room of a TV newsroom or a stock exchange trading room, with twenty active TV screens plastered on a chess board flashing simultaneously, except there is no action in the background, but only sculptural

busts with mouths moving against a flat backdrop —just a wall, curtain, bookshelf, painting, or if you’re creative enough, a borrowed interior for that make-believe setup. The simulated interpersonal experience is a parade of anxious voices trapped in rectangles dying to speak their turn on ONE screen, your screen.

You can’t seem to get away with it. The checkered windows are everywhere—on YouTube, orchestras or pop singers staging remote home concerts; on “Stay Home” comedy shows, hosts “zooming” with multiple guests; on TV variety shows, personalities commenting in separate boxed frames; on news and weather reports; in schools used for home schooling; in hospitals, homes for the elderly, restaurants, and of course, companies; then, right in your very own living room, with your friends and family.

ZOOM, the explosive mobile application, founded in 2011 by Eric Yuan from California, U.S.A., and formally released in 2013, was initially engineered for hosting teleconferences in companies. With the sudden surprise of the Coronavirus, the application rocketed 2.13 million downloads in March 2020, and, like a stinging virus, has infected 200 million users on a daily average basis. While this hip phenomenon looks very refreshing and exciting to many, recent studies show an increased flow of fatigue and insecurity among ZOOM users. The application has faced criticisms regarding cybersecurity, for one. Problems with hackers spying on ZOOM calls, unconscious sharing of Meeting IDs across other social media, leaving windows open for anyone to crash in, ZOOM bombing and its voluntary share of offensive images, and end-to-end encryption, are just some of the disconcerting issues that had to be handled.

More importantly, however, are the mental and behavioural implications that may affect the users unconsciously. Views have expressed mild indications of social pressure to stay constantly focused on bodily movement, tone, and pitch of voice that would usually require a steadier level of perfection and more potent energy, versus face-to-face communication. The obligatory necessity to balance body and mind is claimed to be exhausting at some point. Silence can be a disturbing occurrence in group video chats, which is easily interpreted as a technical fault, whereas a few seconds of it in personal conversation can be tolerable. There is also the awkward sight of multiple sets of eyes curiously gazing out at you (or if not, at the suggestive background behind you), simply due to the physically flat layout of the screen, versus these same sets of eyes, which can be circling around or behind you in the actual setting. Some people have used the term “performance” to describe a ZOOM session, because you seem to be prompted to prepare an “acceptable” physical setting in terms of personal appearance and background; the latter, especially, which belongs to your individual territory that could be an unintentional reflection of your persona. In business, while online video chats help to maintain the workflow, the obligation to present yourself formally to a horizontal panel of co-workers poses a psychological tension, like being studied intensely. Recently, a newly hired employee of an IT company in Tokyo was dismissed from work by his superiors who claimed that he “performed” badly during a company ZOOM session. The accusations enumerated improper attire, jutting his chin out of the window screen, and his knee being visible in the frame.

There is something rather unsettling about a virtual frontline of numerous faces on a flat screen piercing through your eyes. For some, the reminder of its purpose to compensate for the unfortunate reality of disallowing or minimizing personal interaction during the time of quarantine can carve deeper paralyzed emotions. The remote communication tool, likewise, seems to corrupt our self-complexity, when work, family, home, and personal life used to be each segregated compartments in our everyday lives, but now have been compressed into one single space, only to be more miniaturized into one window screen. Nevertheless, in today’s teleworking business lifestyle, video conferencing seems almost inescapable. During that obsolete era of letter-writing before E-mailing or social media chatting turned our lives around, personal communication, in its raw essence, meant and emphasized exactly that: personal. It wrapped an intimate relationship between two people reveling in private thoughts, whether in words, sealed firmly in an envelope, or by a voice (such as the telephone), concluded by replacing the receiver. In these times, however, the extension of our inner selves has stretched beyond the language of ownership across universal boundaries, with no closure—where Facebook comments or other social media chat messages are shared, read and scrutinized openly, and worse, reach audiences we don’t even know (or care) are reading them or not, thus, superseding personal intentions with impersonal results.

Indeed, the virtual happy hour is a dry and sweet mixed concoction of animated bytes made to feel real, sometimes serving an intrapersonal, more than interpersonal, connection. In careless episodes, it stages vulnerable platforms for misinterpretation. Yet, perhaps, online conferencing or group video chatting is the most reliable digitized cure for not only securing a sound business synergy as satellite working is becoming more rampant, but also for filling the void of emptiness that has crippled our ego in defeating the unknown during this moment of crisis. In some ways, it psychologically loosens the chain of laws enforced against our will by encouraging us to cling to abstract facial interplay instead, and nourishes our esteem in believing that we are not alone in this new world of restrained distancing.

This inevitable path to modern communication may be imposing a mindful challenge on our ability to enhance our speech technique, and to manifest our barest intentions as openly and as humanely as possible with or without a LCD monitor. Whether we can articulate ourselves as effectively via a metal barrier or not can only be measured by our natural or superficial approach to self-expression.

3D Illustration by Dennis Sun