Written by Professor Rouge
While I am an academic ghostwriter at Unemployed Professors, I also teach university and have other personal and business interests that require me to use zoom. In the classroom, Zoom has represented a lifesaver for allowing us to continue teaching during the Pandemic but has dramatically detracted from the degree of real and meaningful connection that we can build with our students. I heavily emphasize the importance of critical thinking through class discussion in terms of ensuring that my students gain a firm grasp of the material that I have assigned to them. In this respect, Zoom simply cannot recreate the real world classroom experience. I do not truly believe that my students are learning as well as they would outside of a Pandemic and I honestly don’t believe that they are getting their money’s worth in relation to the tuition that they are paying.
My gripes with Zoom extend to my professional life. Given that I have some business interests that go beyond academic ghostwriting and writing custom essays, I have to hold meetings on Zoom. Like with my students, one of the challenges of holding meetings on Zoom is that we cannot have real conversations.
Normally, a face to face business meeting will involve brainstorming through polite and proactive interruptions. This just does not work with Zoom. Aside from the fact that some people are still struggling to share their audio and video, something that is a sign of our society’s generation gap, Zoom does not allow for the type of iterated long form conversation that is needed to effectively plan and brainstorm. Instead, Zoom is almost like texting or e-mailing in that we really have to each take our turn to communicate. When we do this, our words become more stagnant, less expressive and we are far less able to convey what we believe. That’s not even mentioning the fact that we will often forget some of our most important ideas while we are waiting for our turn to talk.
While the use of Zoom is decreasing somewhat because of how we are learning to live with the virus, I worry that Zoom has permanently altered our ability to interact with others. In the same manner that social media and texting has led us to have shallower and less meaningful conversations with those who surround us, Zoom has stifled our expression in face-to-face conversations.
For students who have now grown up using Zoom for class during their formative years or for new members of the labor market who have had more Zoom meetings than face-to-face ones, what are the implications of Zoom for communication in our society? Personally, I cannot see very many positive ones. Meaningful interaction is based on the ability to iterate and intersperse ideas in a fluid and dynamic manner. It’s normal that we interrupt each other during conversations. We just need to do it politely. Zoom is continuing to prevent us from doing this and is changing the way we communicate in a manner that I fear will continue to make our communications less effective in the years and decades to come.