“You're Muted": Performance, Precarity, and the Logic of Zoom

Through the frame of Zoom, this collection of essays examines the rapid emergence of videoconferencing in everyday life under COVID-19, its preexisting performative logic, and the ongoing implication of these practices for millions of individuals and institutions. The year 2023 marked the end of the World Health Organization's classification of the COVID-19 outbreak as a “public health emergency of international concern,” yet many of the organizational and institutional restructurings that occurred in the rapid response to the pandemic have remained firmly in place. The prevalence of videoconferencing in everyday life marks one such instance, not only highlighting the dramatic social and cultural transformations that occurred during a period of lockdowns, social distancing, and stay-at-home orders, but also serving as an index of all that has emerged as the “new normal” since March 2020. Overnight, it seemed, Zoom emerged as the default videoconferencing platform, rapidly morphing from brand name to eponymous generic. While this volume focuses predominantly on Zoom and its place in the collective imagination and daily practice of those of us whose lives are profoundly caught up in digital networks, many of these insights presented here apply to other videoconferencing platforms as well, and a supporting logic that has governed neoliberal lives since long before the first lockdowns began. The twelve chapters in this collection explore how videoconferencing platforms in general, and Zoom in particular, have provided individuals and institutions new modes of “engagement,” while at the same time reifying, normalizing, and domesticating modes of surveillance, control, and marginalization that have been part and parcel of a networked-based performative logic for nearly a century. Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Contents Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: The Performative Logic of Zoom Part I: Zoom Embodiments Chapter 1: The Face of the Network: Subjectivity, Securitization, and the Production of Sad Affect on Zoom Chapter 2: Mediating the Death of a Parent: Zoom and the Deathbed Vigil Chapter 3: Zoom Etiquette Guides: Negotiating between Workplace Professionalism and Gendered Homeplace Surveillance in the Videoconferencing Borderlands Part II: Staging Zoom Chapter 4: Proxemics and Nonverbal Communication Dilemmas on Zoom Chapter 5: Zoom’s Performative Window: Affordances and Constraints Chapter 6: Eigengrau: Reimagining Videoconferencing as a “Slow Platform” Part III: Transverse Networks and the Neoliberal University Chapter 7: The Zoom Machinic in Postdigital Learning Ecologies: An Exploration of Educators’ Experiences via Three Case Studies Chapter 8: “Networked Togetherness, I Guess ̄\_(ツ)_/ ̄”: Subverting the Academic Zoom Chat through the Subcultural Collective Chapter 9: Stage Directions and Snarky Comments: Shadow Networks in Zoom Meetings Throughout the Covid-19 Pandemic Part IV: Unstable Connections Chapter 10: Locked In or Locked Out? Aging Migrants Enacting Autonomous and Dependent Copresence on Zoom during the Pandemic Chapter 11: “Zoom Saved All Our Lives”: A Case of Nonprofit Resilient Organizing during the COVID-19 Pandemic Chapter 12: (Un)expected Errors Contributors Index