Zoom meetings. Zoom schooling. Zoom happy hours. Zoom blind dates. Zoom original plays. Zoom job interviews. Zoom religious services. Zoom fitness classes. Zoom funerals. Zoom weddings.
Why not, we thought, a Zoom page 1!
So that’s what we have this issue, just to make you feel right at home.
But what about Zoom’s effect on our psyches, on our desire for beyond-virtual social sustenance?
In our pandemic zeitgeist, is Zooming a godsend or simply the end of real life as we knew it?
Fair to say there’s hasn’t been such a longing to see people in more than two dimensions since 3D sensation Creature From the Black Lagoon drew throngs of 1950s moviegoers.
(Hey, that’s an idea even River Towns native Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t thought of yet — Zoom 3D! There’s even an appropriately assaultive name for him to brand it: In Your Facebook.)
This musing on Zooming is not to make light of technology’s compelling power to bring people together virtually at a time that we are being sagely advised — and are obliged — to keep our safe distance physically.
It cannot help but make you wonder, though … whither evolutionary behavior?
In adulthood, will a member of today’s Generation Alpha (ages 0-15) be given to telling a long-winded friend, “mute yourself”?
Will digital interaction with fewer than 10 people at a time become a leading cause of depression, brought on by a sense of isolation?
Is Zoom real life? Or a sneak preview of mid-21st Century life?
Questions are easy. Life is hard.
