Coronavirus may slowly be loosening its grip on our lives, but remote technology has grabbed us by the throat and it won’t let go. “Zoom” has become a household word since the pandemic arrived in March, and communicating face to face through a computer screen is reality, not technological fiction.
Coronavirus ushered in the Zoom Age and made us the stars, directors, makeup and hair artists, scene decorators and producers of our own mini-movies.
In that bygone age three months ago, you could show up for work or an appointment reasonably well-groomed and impress others or fade into the background and go along to get along.
That’s all changed with Zoom. Sit down in front of that microcamera and now you have to wonder if too much light behind you is frizzing your hair or bouncing glare off your bald head. If you don’t sit far enough back from the camera, you loom over the viewer like a creature in a horror movie.
Bad Zoom lighting makes you look even older or creepy-looking. Too much light and you look like you are on an operating table. And then there is the challenge of Zoom conversation etiquette. Technology being what it is, Zoom sessions have more than their share of sudden silences featuring an odd tableau of disembodied heads staring into the camera.
The key to effectively speaking on Zoom is succinct but not abrupt declarative sentences and a cheerful tone to offset the aural gobbledy-gook of one Zoomer talking over another.
Swampscott Board of Selectmen candidates Neal Duffy, Stephen Williams and David Grishman graciously agreed to an Essex Media Group (EMG) Zoom forum on Thursday and gamely persevered through all of the Zoom pitfalls listed above.
A cheerful “good morning” from EMG Community Relations Director and La Voz Publisher Carolina Trujillo elicited a time-delayed response from the three candidates.
Room lighting varied considerably for each candidate and while Duffy sat at the center of his screen, Williams leaned into the viewer as he spoke. Eloquent by turn and professionally dressed, each candidate looked very different viewed through Zoom’s multi-faceted prism.
When he walked onto a presidential debate stage on Sept. 26, 1960, then-U.S. Sen. John F. Kennedy was trailing in the polls behind Vice President Richard Nixton. Television’s merciless camera eye and Kennedy’s savvy understanding of lighting and makeup gave 70 million Americans a look at a fresh vibrant Kennedy and a haggard-looking Nixon.
Zoom and its companion mediums are the new television and, like it or not, we are its stars willingly or begrudgingly embracing technology with witty conversation fillers and attractive backdrops or stumbling into the 21st century’s third decade with awkward silences and hair that would put Christopher Lloyd in the “Back to the Future” movies to shame.
