Zoom as an ethnographic field

As the coronavirus pandemic hit, the government issued a fiat ordering a stringent lockdown. The roads and sidewalks were emptied, the shops shuttered, and the phalanx of police guarded the junctions from casual strolling and nonessential driving. The scheduled programs, seminars, meetings and appointments were indefinitely deferred. People went cloistered inside the four walls of their homes or the rented rooms, listening to radios, watching televisions or mindlessly scrolling the algorithms. The opportunity to spend free time with the family members, after a long time, evolved as a response to the fear of a death-dealing virus presumably spreading in the public sphere. The home, which was in constant interaction with the public, and where it drew its essence from, gradually showed how it could turn sour from sweet from the harshness of its own sheer domesticity. In contradistinction to an initial assumption that lockdown would free us from the unfree labor conditions of the public working places, and we would be able to pass time by a relentless and reckless exploration of our hobbies, we soon started to pine for the same old routines. The social media provided avenues and practically advised on how we should approach our hobbies, which books we should pore over, which movies we should watch, and what DIYs we should get our hands on. The middle class cyberspace displayed accordingly its exploits--exotic, elaborate vittles and crafts, as an unintended affront to the precariats who were on the verge of hunger. As philosopher Theodor Adorno defines boredom in Free Time as “the function of [social] life which is lived under the compulsion to work, and under strict division of labor”, excitement flagged too soon, and boredom reigned in. The boredom, and the anxiety it brought, forced people to return back to the reified labor regime through computerized work-from-home mode, and to a compelling engagement in micro-discourses of the social networking sites with a fair degree of petulance and irascibility. Chaos, and the ineptitude of the authorities to take exact measures to curb the spread of the virus, spurred the gentrified protests of the urban youths whose age and vigor entails them to peregrinate over places pretty much like the virus itself. It seemed staying in and staying out of the houses for the longer periods were both menacing--only a delicately balanced shuttle between the two appeared to be salubrious. Objectively, the financialization of capital, and the neoliberal paradigm that can’t sustain savings for a few months, and is reluctant to provide “basic goods” during the crises even for the relief of indigent families, and subjectively, the associated aspiration of people to meet quantitatively set “productive” goals got disrupted by the lockdown. As days, weeks and months passed in the passivity of countless scrolls, we witnessed a surge in publicization of a form of face-to-face interaction in the social media--the zoom, first as an anodyne for boredom, and second as a compulsion for performance based work-plans.

Even though cognizant of the fact that there is cornucopia of video conferencing platforms on the internet, I first came to know about the specific brand and its service through the talk programs aired on YouTube, and saw how it sneaked into the individual private spaces of the guests, and diverged those images to the public. The zoom webinars, a portmanteau of web and seminar, soon became a vogue phrase of the professionals--sharing screenshots of combos in the social sites, and receiving applauds for the same. As the zoom screenshots grew profusely, I secretly wanted to get a role in one of those. Eventually, I participated in a handful of webinars with excitement until the point of time it seemed too trite.