[ad_1]
I recently had a conversation about zoom development with my son and his new high school teacher. It was school time. So the son and the teacher sat together in front of the classroom computer while I logged in from home.
Everything mundane and familiar: his questions, his answers, sometimes proud, sometimes evasive. And yet there was a strange sense of alienation. He was so close to me that I could feel the folds of the shirt, the usual line that draws the profile of the nose, and yet I groped. My hands wanted to reach out, the habit of wordless contact was so entwined in the movements of the fingers, but the only thing that existed was the cold screen. As a body, I perceived a bias, a dissonance in our relationship, in what it is to be a human being with others.
Early in the covid pandemic it was determined that the virus would not be treated Social distancing without with physical abstinence. We would continue to socialize, attend conferences, and eat dinner together, only we could find a way to leave the bodies outside.
While we have digital platforms like zoom and teams to thank for allowing us to meet up, it is obvious that sensual nonsense affects, perhaps even distorts, our interactions. Family reunions and student seminars become two-dimensional rooms where faces are transformed into pixels and gaps of meaning emerge when sound and image are added together. The small change between the movements of the lips and the conversation that comes out, sometimes just a microsecond, creeps into the feeling of a fundamental disturbance: a crack in my perception of reality, in the ontology, what it is.
*
It’s no wonder that French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty is experiencing something of a renaissance. It focuses on the importance of corporeity for our perception, for what we can know about the world. More than an object or matter, the body is our situation; it is through our senses – sight, smell, and tactile sensitivity – that the world emerges. What we can understand of the surrounding landscapes and people presupposes a physicality from which visual impressions and heat waves originate, from which resonance and echo arise. The task of the body is to put everything together and give it its meaning.
I am acting undeniably For the world to intrude, molded to leak. Through eyes, ears and skin, others enter me. It is with the help of the senses that I am extended and forced out of myself, beyond the narrow temporality of the self. The situation of the body is not an individual matter but my anchoring in the world.
Clapping the facial expressions of the eyes and laughter, everything that is silenced and pixelated in the zoom, not only creates rhythm and meaning, but they are building blocks in our interpersonal relationships.
Perhaps it is this perception that seems to me to be widening. Before foreclosure, it is clear that our relationships, our humanity, presuppose a corporeality. The world needs sensual attention to exist, the vibrations of others are what allow me to perceive my own resonant background. Without the bodies, we become ghostly in front of each other, like the spirits in the meme on social media where virtual meetings are described as spiritualistic sessions: “Elizabeth, are you there?” Someone floats out of the picture, disappears, and appears as a shadow on a background of sun-drenched palm trees.
It’s an explanation for the spreading side effect of physical distancing. The restrictions and blocks have caused the use of digital meeting rooms to literally explode. The Wall Street Journal reports that the zoom has gone from 10 million users to 300 million in just a couple of months, while more and more people are complaining of fatigue and profound fatigue.
The phenomenon, which has received a its very name, “zoom-fatigue”, can be explained by the fact that the exclusion of bodies from digital rooms limits information. When communicative complexity – in the form of a hummingbird, fingers playing with a pencil – intersects, a verbal hyper-focus emerges that is effective in breaking a meeting agenda but is exhausting and less equipped to maintain relationships. Conversations lose their energy, their rhythm, their humor. What separates them from the pure exchange of information.
Sociologist Randall Collins believes that physical distancing runs the risk of reducing our feelings for one another. Based on Émile Durkheim’s work on the importance of rituals for social cohesion, it emphasizes the importance of the rhythmic intertwining of bodies, even in late modern societies. Clapping the facial expressions of the eyes and laughter, everything that is muted and pixelated in the zoom, not only creates rhythm and meaning, but they are building blocks in our interpersonal relationships.
Collins’ example is a digital research meeting where a received grant is silent. No applause, no shouts of joy. Not surprisingly, he writes, such a reaction presupposes bodily coordination. The fact that the meeting participants did not burst into happy cheers not only reflects how social context shapes emotional expression, that is, the representation of emotions, but affects our emotional lives in depth. In the absence of joy, joy diminishes and social cohesion weakens.
Apathy is in danger in addition to creating a sense of loss. The zoom room is reminiscent of missed meetings, how much you would have liked to hug a relative, how painful it is not to reach him. In a well-distributed tweet, the organizational researcher Gianpiero Petriglieri writes: “It is easier to be in the presence or absence of the other, than in the constant presence of the absence of the other.”
*
Although I see others, my body perceives a void. It lacks the waves of movement that intervene in my own field of action and disrupt my circles. Nothing vibrates on the screen, no skin texture, no odors, and the sensitivity revealed by a rattling sound when a foot hits the floor is effectively turned off with a red line through the micron symbol.
It is lonely to be a body without others.
Although my computer looks like a security company screen, bounded rooms captured by cameras, it is easy to escape.
Perhaps the feeling of loss has to do with mediation. Zoom won’t let us I know each other, instead we look at photos of each other. Virtual meeting rooms create the illusion of eye contact while we know, and sometimes feel, that the eyes we almost meet are busy with something else. Although my computer looks like a security company screen, bounded rooms captured by cameras, it is easy to escape. Only the shell is visible when I scroll through the news. Without cohesive vision, what Merleau-Ponty describes as the incorporation of the world in us, a densification, without the gaze of evasion, someone who values and at the same time learns to prosper in seclusion.
Zoom lets us follow real-time realization. At the same time that I perceive the mimicry of my lips from the inside, from the origin of the movement, I see how my face flattens and freezes on the screen. Reduced to representation, the image of someone speaking. It prevents me from entering the conversation, the shared flow, the one that connects. The area where the body does not mainly transmit what is already thought, but is part of the thought, where the words is emotions, currents of thought, impulses.
Side by side, the little boxes rise. There we are, separated, trapped in the images of our own corporeity, looking into the eyes of others without even meeting our gaze.
