Z: Zoom Is Not the Same

Two months ago, I had never heard of Zoom. Over the past week, I used it 5 times, and my children used it another 3 times, while Ari uses it multiple times daily at work. While we're staying physically distant from all our friends and co-workers or clients, it seems like we've replaced as many of our in person interactions as possible with meetings using Zoom, Skype, or Google Hangouts. I am really grateful that I can see two-dimensional images of my friends', fellow church members', and students' faces, knowing that people who lived through pandemics centuries ago couldn't even have imagined this kind of luxury. But let's not kid ourselves. To single out a specific interaction type, Zoom Bible study is not the same as in person Bible study.

Earlier this year, when I went to Community Bible Study each Tuesday morning, I needed to wake up early. It was essential that I have my lesson prepared for the leaders' study as well as having prepared to teach the study to my middle school class, including gathering any materials needed for the object lesson and activities and putting my guitar in the car. I got everything loaded and drove for about an hour and 15 minutes, unless traffic was unusually bad. During that time, we all ate muffins and listened to an audiobook, and it created a clear distinction in my mind between being at home and being at Bible study.

Since the lockdown, our wonderful Associate Teaching Director set up Bible study on Zoom so that we didn't miss a single week. But the level of preparation needed was far lower. Instead of preparing to teach my middle school class, I was simply scanning my answers to the worksheet questions and emailing them to the moms so they could discuss the answers with their children if they chose to. I wasn't leading them in worship, so I didn't need to even touch my guitar. Our normal morning routine worked just fine for me to be on time to log in for our Leaders' Council study at 8:30 am, so there was nothing about the lead up to Bible study that helped me distance my mind from my home concerns. And there was nothing to keep my children from interacting with me and their noise from distracting me.

In addition, Zoom itself has numerous disadvantages over in person meetings. For one thing, eye contact and body language are impossible. My laptop's webcam can't help others distinguish which of over a dozen rectangles on my screen I am looking at, and I can't turn my body toward the speaker when I'm about to make a comment. I need to keep my session muted most of the time because of the inevitable background noises of doors slamming or boys quibbling over their Lego in the kitchen. This means there's an extra step if I want to make a comment. If I'm using speaker view instead of gallery view (essential in a large group to be able to see the facial expressions of the speaker), I can't tell if it has detected me as the speaker because I still see the previous speaker. A few people don't even turn on their videos, so I see their names but don't know if they're there. They could be listening, attentively but invisibly, or they could be in another room reading a book - there's no way to tell.

Generally, over the course of the discussion, a few people will make comments that would have triggered some sort of casual comment afterwards if we were in person - I might have gone up to the person and spent a few seconds saying, "I liked your point about..." or "I didn't know you also...". This might have led to a brief conversation, or not, but it would certainly build our relationship. Zoom doesn't allow for that sort of break-out private conversation, unless you send a private text, but the content one conveys by text isn't the same as what one can convey with eye contact.

In his well-known book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman makes the point that "the medium is the message." In other words, the way we communicate what we have to communicate can say as much about what is important as the actual content of the communication. While I'm glad we have a medium that allows us to communicate some of our message, I think it's important to remember that we are not just images or faces, but whole humans with bodies that play an essential role in how we interact. Once this is all over, I hope I'll make the most of being able to communicate all the things that simply can't be communicated using a screen.