My favourite piece of trivia this year has been the one about how the last time us humans maintained such close eye contact face to face was back when we were weighing our options along the binaries of 'Hmm. Kill or Mate?'
Through 2021, we've been doing precisely this, practically all the time - albeit via screens minus (arguably) the binaries running in our heads. It's how we did our meetings, our schooling, our yoga, much of our socializing, and of course, our therapy. If there's one definitive feature of the year then, it's the video call. As the months rolled by, we got Zoom weddings as well as Zoom firings. Zoom prayer meets & Zoom parties, Zoom dates & Zoom bombings. Plus, MANY memes.
What does it mean for who we are as "social animals" though? For our definitions and the ever-blurring lines between the private and the public? The performance of our selves as we adjust the lighting and filters and backdrops versus what we choose to hide/nudge out of the frame? What did it mean for Shweta, you think? The 900 employees who were let go of, over a Zoom call? Or the CEO who took time off, soon after? And seriously, what do you make of Zoom's investments in mental health?
It's an ongoing debate on privacy, big tech, our bodies and data, our anxieties and peeves. What turns us on is an ever-changing fable after all, cameras on or off, mute or unmute.
In the final dispatch of 2021's Outspoken-ish, T explores these questions and more, weaving in her experiences as a professor over Zoom facing a classroom full of boxes on screen and her own face staring back at her, bringing in thoughts from what she's read and watched this year, including Netflix's Navarasa & Kitamura's novel Intimacies, and more.
Keep your eyes peeled then. For a Zoomtastic Zoom-ocalypse year-ender Outspoken-ish edition.
In your inbox soon.