Dating Apps in times of Corona – A way back into love?
Defining the scope - Where do we stand?
Paula Bialski’s talk this morning encouraged us to look at our topic of dating apps from another perspective: not only are dating apps a way to seek love, affection and sex, but also can they be seen as a tool to reduce complexity of our daily lives – similar to the idea of techniques like Scrum reducing the complexity of software development as proposed by Paula.
This idea helped us to narrow our topic down to specific elements we want to look at in the context of dating apps. For instance, how dating apps are in fact used to reduce uncertainties and complexity in times of Corona. Additionally – based on the lecturers’ inputs and our own thoughts – we’d like to investigate further how people present themselves via dating apps, if dating apps are in fact used as tools to manage anxieties in the current crisis, how we establish trust in such online settings, what is the intended purpose of using such apps and what other uses evolved throughout time. All these subquestions shall help us to find an answer to the overarching question:
How does the pandemic change the way dating apps organize us?
Today we gained hands-on experience and deep-dived into the subject matter by conducting our chosen empirical approach.
Empirical Approach - How do we tackle the subject?
For the empirical approach, in a first step, we have developed a questionnaire that deals with various aspects of using dating apps. With regard to our interest in comparing usage between past and present, it was not very difficult to develop questions that are aimed precisely at this. We decided to move from general questions to more specific questions related to the current Corona pandemic. Since a public questioning of passengers on the street is a rather inappropriate idea, we will send the questionnaire to friends and acquaintances.
In a second step – the auto-ethnographic part – we used the dating app Tinder ourselves in order to examine how people present themselves and to check if we are able to observe changes compared to the time before Corona. Soon, it became clear that Corona as a prominent topic already took over Tinder: guys use the pandemic as a
humorous element by posing with a bottle of Corona beer; they claim to look for a “quarantine buddy”; or simply utilize the topic as a “hook” for a potential conversation with matches. However, the overall manner of presenting oneself seems to remain the same: creating a desirable image of oneself (of rather one “ideal self”), no matter if real-life dates are in sight or not.
For us it is interesting to approach the phenomenon Tinder from a scientific approach, as it opened up new and fresh perspectives on dating apps. Not having one’s own goals in mind, but an empirical intention, led us to reflect more on ourselves, as well: What do we or what would we expect from the use of the App? Does or would our use of Tinder change given the current crisis?
Various interesting ideas arose by conducting the auto-ethnographic approach and we already gained some revealing insights into the impact of dating apps on us at the time of the pandemic. We’re keen to elaborate more on that in the course of the next days!
Key research insights of today - What did we learn?
Based on the lecture and own research, our today’s discussion led us to a few interesting aspects of the dating apps.
In regard to the lecture by Paula Bialski we looked into the crisis management ability of the apps as well as the phenomenon of establishing offline trust via online tools. In our questionnaire we intend to inquire the users about these aspects, namely how does the app change their perception of trust and whether it reduces their stresses and anxiety.
We discussed the intended purpose of the app, and quickly realised that currently there are so many variations of it. Starting from the self-esteem boost, through gathering local traveling insights, finding a talk buddy or even financial gains.
Moreover, we hypothesised that thanks to the Pandemic the previously existing stigmatisation of this dating tool, might be reduced in the future. As singles are stuck at homes, Tinder is their only way of approaching strangers, hence the bad connotation or shame related to its usage may diminish.
Next, our desktop research motivated us to think about the impact of the location on dating. The apps are associated with never ending supply of potential partners, as we, through constant mobility, can always approach someone new, Tinder makes it even more possible. However, the current mobility ban limits the opportunities, even in the digital world. On Tinder users are bound by their location and left only with the locals. Yet actually, this particular app allows one to overcome this barrier through purchase of the premium account that allows for free re-location of the virtual account, providing access to new possibilities.
Finally, inspired by the New York Times article (Fisher, 2020) we discussed the current tendency to return to the slow life. As Corona limits so many of our opportunities, we tend to focus on the here and now. Same applies to online dating - we have more time, not so much to talk regarding the smalltalk, and the limited number of profiles in the city. I.e we are somewhat forced to focus on the real conversation and connection. Hence, we hypothesize that the pandemic age could be the way back into real love.
By Martyna, Marielle, Benedetta & Muriel
0 Comments7 Minutes
Could you imagine the feeling of constant surveillance?
Reflected upon Paula’s idea of limited screen time. We decided that it was effective to have meetings in slots and individually work the remaining time. So we splitted up and worked on ourselves on different topics:
- Surveillance
- Awareness
- Delivery
- Disinfection
- Emotional aspects
We recognized that working on our own as well as having the opportunity to go out and work outside would be great to have a shift in motivation and not just be in front of the computer all day.
We decided that tomorrow, we will go outside and try to act like human drones, in order to improve our understanding of emotional feelings about the use of drones. We will also suppose that a drone will be watching us while we'll be walking around the city and we'll try to imagine how people's behaviour could change when it takes place. In forehand to this idea, we have considered how it would be like to have our technology, the drone, around us. Have we experienced the feeling of surveillance? Something flying over us permanently? Probably not. However, it is precisely this question of the experience of constant surveillance that is very exciting to ask. And if it is just a lack of habitualization. In comparison to China for example, where there is a completely different level of constant surveillance. Where it is being accepted and even desired in exchange for safety. This were questions we were wondering about and trying to imagine how it would be for us to have something like that technology around us all the time.
Not only having a drone flying around us may feel uncomfortable and can stem a feeling of loss of privacy, but can make people feel paranoid or on the other hand prevent loneliness and enhance a factor of security and safety in the streets.
The aspect of surveillance which the drone very much evokes the Orwell’s 1984 environment. Some fear that the mass usage of police drones is not a part of the solution to prevent Coronavirus spreading but rather it falls back on tech-solutionism. In other words, deploying a new technology to this issue is like putting a digital plaster on the damage but it does not contribute to the real solution for the root of the problem.
In addition, Daniel will use his drone tomorrow to record some videos to share with us, and we are going to make a reaction on that.
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We did it for the ‘gram and went LIVE!
Wow, these were intense live sessions in the Haniel Summer School so far! After a quick wrap up about the way we have been working together and a short brainstorming session to understand how we can improve the way we interact virtually, we started to dig deeper into liveness on Instagram. So, we actually went “live”.
My first netnography experience while hosting a live session
After a long discussion about who was going to go “live” on Instagram to get the whole experience of netnography, I was only one click and less than five seconds away from being “live”. I was scared but at the same time I had my group in the back, supporting me with questions, which made me feel less alone and exposed. As fast as I got online, people started to join and leave “our” live session continuously. I thought this is going to be a very social experiment with real time interaction and enhanced positive emotions, which are able to fight the negative emotions we experienced during COVID-19 so far. However, at the beginning I felt terribly exposed and lonely and started to giggle around because it was uncomfortable. Even when I was “live” with 10 other people, I felt like I was alone, talking to a device or to my image and not to my social network. So I started to interact with the people to understand how they experience the liveness of Instagram by asking questions. However, even if I was asking questions, this made the whole social experience even harder because I felt there was a time shift between my questions and the answers slowly popping up in the comment section. I was very thankful for these few people trying to interact with me over this “live” session by commenting. At this moment, I tried to directly address the participants to feel connected to them and less alone but it did not work. However, even if I should have felt connected to the social, I felt very disconnected at this moment.
The feeling of the “live” guest
Being a “visitor” in the live session of my group member and this time paying attention to my feelings as a guest, made me aware of how “intouchable” one becomes when the spotlight isn’t on oneself. All the pressure is on the host. I felt particularly connected to the host during the live session as we were directly in contact through the Zoom meeting. Yet, I didn’t feel the urge to directly interact with her. The fact that the guest isn’t able to talk, be seen and only write, makes one quite invisible within the crowd. In a way, the host is interacting with the crowd and not with you directly, thus reducing the need for any specific interaction. Some guests might think “someone else is going to answer the question” or “let’s see what people say”. Hence taking any spotlight away from oneself and leaving the responsibility to others.
From my perspective the meaning of social interaction is very unclear. The word “inter-action” rooting from the term “between” and “action”, loses its sense here. When being a guest, the “action” is taking place on the other side of the screen. In that sense, the action isn’t taking place where I am, but solely where the live host is. Thus, blurring the sense of “social” and giving loneliness and interaction another meaning.
Being a guest in a live session feels similar to watching a live show on TV, you feel closer to the show than if it wasn’t “live”, however you aren’t part of it. The host’s emotions are difficult to grasp and so is the feeling of empathy and connection.
Instagram has made the interaction easier for the public. It is however still a work in progress until people feel comfortable with interacting directly with the host. I think it is still too new and unknown and will probably take some time to become a normality.
Live sessions as a dichotomy?
In the last few weeks and months of the pandemic, there has been an increased use of live sessions on Instagram. On the one hand, the focus is on the participation, motivation and connection of users and therefore live sessions do function as a link to the feeling of community on Instagram. While they offer access to a broad range of topics, most of the live sessions are used particularly often to e.g. organize cooking events, reading lectures, watching series together or doing sports and yoga classes. It is striking that these are mostly very everyday and relatively unspectacular activities and it feels as if these sessions are intended to serve, among other things, as a replacement for lost leisure activities, entertainment and to increase a community feeling. In addition, live sessions are supposed to offer the opportunity to engage in a direct exchange with the audience and convey emotions in “real time”. Furthermore, it should open up a deep insight into the privacy and the premises of the live-host vis-á-vis.
Because the live hosts are always in focus, even if they add someone to the session, they have a central position with a lot of influence, power and responsibility. It remains to be discussed whether this might even give them the status of or be compared to “a priest in a sermon”.
On the other hand, it is an opportunity for companies and entrepreneurs, such as musicians, comedians, personal trainers and many others to continue working despite the pandemic. The actually necessary physical presence of the user and worker is replaced by a virtual presence.
Watching a live training session
Before COVID-19 came, I used to go two to three times a week to the gym; after a few weeks of stopping it, I decided to try to follow a “home training session” through the Instagram live function. I chose to follow Kirsty Godso’s live workout, pushed by positive feedback that I have read about her kind of training. A lot of people said that she was very motivating and they have started to train at home thanks to her Instagram lives. What I felt was against expectations. She was really good at explaining how to make the correct positions in every exercise but I didn’t find the motivation that I have, when I go to the gym. In fact, I felt very lonely even if thousands of people were watching the same live session with me from all different parts of the world. As a matter of fact, I didn’t see anyone performing with me but I just imagined it happening. Moreover, I found the home environment distracting, like the sound of the doorbell and my dog that thought I wanted to play with her. For those reasons, I personally believe that in a fitness studio it is easier to find motivation and be inspired by other people who are sweating with you. Nevertheless, reading the feedback of some live training sessions, I have understood that many people who have never trained in their life have found inspiration from these “virtual trainers" to approach sport.
From the point of view of the trainer, I think live sessions have been a sort of “salvation”. In fact, trainers could not work since all the gyms were closed, giving them a lot of free time to spend with “virtual class” of people who wanted to be trained. They had the possibility to show their capabilities and, in some cases, after the reopening of the gyms, they started to do online training sessions in other platforms requiring a small sum of money, which, of course, is not comparable with the amount required by a personal trainer physically present. This formula seems to work also because there are people who are not feeling already prepared to come back to the gym since the virus is still circulating. However, we don’t know what will happen once it will be over.
The business live session
Being on the side of the spectator is quite always easier than being the “leading actor”. Even when we are talking about business topics, as in the other Instagram environment such as Politics, it is sometimes difficult to perceive which is the leading point of view of the spokesman. The first feeling is like “I have lost myself in some dark place, I cannot understand what they are talking about”. In the first instance, even for a management expert, it is not so easy to identify the leading thought / idea. On the other hand, it seems paradoxical but Instagram has helped to create during business seminars we can hear complex and specific terms such as “Innovative management”, “leading strategies”, “target price oriented”. The first time I followed a business stream on Instagram I noticed that many terms had been simplified. In fact, Instagram has facilitated the spread of streams, simplifying their content even for those who are not experts in the field. Or better, spokesmans have simplified their seminars content, adapting them to everybody. It is very interesting and useful participating in live streaming in which in a few minutes you are updated about stock exchanges trends, news about Zoom exponential growing value of shares and so on. Another key aspect is that Instagram business lives do not replace business seminars, lessons ect. They are useful for being updated about world business news. The question is, how will this change after the “COVID-age”? Will instagram also be implemented to make room for the business world too?
At this point, we would like to invite you to share your Instagram “live” experiences with us and tell us how this socio-technical moment has affected you? Comment in the section below!
Aurora De Martin, Emaele de Quatrebarbes, Lara Schulte, Marco Ubalducci & Selma Vuckic
0 Comments13 Minutes
Sun screen: maintaining routines in the HEAT of COVID 🔥😎
Today, we kicked off the Summer Academy with a morning check-in and a lecture. For some of us, it was their first experience with online teaching, while for others it was just another online lecture. Either way, we shared some common feelings that we wanted to reflect upon in this first blogpost:
First of all, we all agreed that turning on the cameras felt really nice. Especially for those of us who had experience with online courses where all students had their cameras turned off, we all found that seeing the other students’ faces felt more engaging and more true to the classroom experience.
We also found that having our own camera on forced us to be more attentive and adopt a studious attitude: just like sitting at the front row in a physical classroom, having our camera on during the online lecture felt like the lecturers had their eyes on us and it would have felt odd to be doing something else while they were speaking. This “first-row” effect had a positive effect on all of us, keeping us focused and engaged.
Another aspect of this morning’s lecture that we discussed was the choice of the professor to lecture without slides. Our experience was that if such teaching may already make it hard to follow in a classroom context, it makes it really challenging in an online setting. With lagging connections and distractions in our own homes - our families, flatmates or partners walking by, being in another video conference, etc. - it is easy to lose track of the lecture for a few moments. In such cases, having visual cues to rely upon can be greatly helpful and we all realized how underappreciated slides were, especially online. While it is unclear whether lecturers and speakers should adapt the format of their slides for online presentations (and how it would be done), it seems that having slides may significantly improve the capacity of students to stay engaged in the lecture, despite under-optimal learning environments.
Finally, we noticed that while online lectures can be done in a very engaging and interactive way, it is hard to compete with presence learning when it comes to the social dimension of university. In the classroom, students are given coffee breaks, which are excellent opportunities to simply chit chat and socialize, but also discuss the content of the course, expand on some interesting ideas, etc.
The second point of reflection we would like to share concerns group work in an online setting. Here, again, the experience was overall positive and we were glad about our ability to coordinate over the weekend and communicate efficiently this afternoon. A specific aspect that we discussed was the dimensions of inclusion that is reinforced when using video conferencing tools. Concretely, when discussing as a group of 4 people, we found that all of us were directly asking each other to share their thoughts and opinions on the topics at hand when noticing that they had become quiet.
Because the participants appear on the screen, and speakers are highlighted, it felt like we were more aware of who was actively engaging in the conversation and who wasn’t, pushing us to make efforts to make sure that all voices were heard. Some of us perceived this aspect of group work positively, as it may make (potentially shy) group members feel more included, and encourage them to share their thoughts and opinion, thereby improving the participant’s experience but also the quality of the discussion’s output. On the other hand, some of us felt that it might be intrusive to call people out, considering that if they remain quiet, it might be simply because they are thinking about the discussion, or don't have anything to say.
Finally, we would like to share some of our group dynamics in coming up with a theme for this week. After this morning’s lecture, we implicitly used the lunch break to brainstorm individually. When we met at 13:00, we were ready to share some of our interests and ideas. After we all introduced our ideas, we consensually agreed on exploring “screens”. For better or for worse, it is a very broad theme, so we had a lot to discuss, and we ended up deciding that each of us would cover their main area of interest in relation to screens. We have decided to cover very distinct aspects of the topic, reflecting the variety in disciplines of our backgrounds:
- Historical perspectives
- Changes in perception of screens
- Screen culture and immersion
- Cognitive processes in work-related settings
Our next steps are to dig into desktop research to explore each of these paths and see how they may relate to one another.
Anna, Dragana, Maylis and Sofia
0 Comments6 Minutes
The Shopping Cart as a two-fold symbol of consumption
The Shopping Cart
By Eric, Suzan, Vladimir and Paul
When we go shopping, the first thing many consumers do is to get a shopping cart. Invented in the 1930s by a supermarket chain owner who was thinking about a way for allowing his customers to move more groceries, it became a must in every supermarket and a key part of the customer experience in many shops. The item became a very popular, if not the most popular symbol for shopping and an increasingly consumerist society. This association makes us understand how deeply this item is rooted in our minds. It is interesting to notice how easily we take this item for granted and think about how upsetting it would be for each of us to enter a supermarket, not being able to find a shopping cart.
Since its invention, the shopping cart has been innovated repeatedly in order to be more practical, more efficient, more appealing, and easy to use. We can now see shopping carts with funny cars into which we can put our children, others with compartments for our pets, different shapes, sizes, and features. Innovations affected the usage and the comfort of the carts, however, with the advent of the internet and e-shops even the meaning of the “shopping cart” was extended: we now indicate not only the physical cart with wheels as a shopping cart but also the list of the items we want to buy online.
Even during the COVID-19 crisis, when the consumers’ behavior significantly changed very quickly and this simple item might become a way to contract the virus, it remains a cornerstone of our shopping experience and is used as a tool to respect social distancing. We decided to focus on this artifact because it is a simple but at the same time important and representative item that is continuously evolving, while remaining a crucial element of the shopping experience of every customer - online or offline.
The analog shopping cart
Shopping as both procurement of necessary goods and as a leisurely pastime is supported by easing the burden of transporting the goods around the store. While the buying could provide their own technology, method or tool to transport these goods, the norm is that the store is the provider of that ‘vehicle’ within the bounds of the physical space belonging to the store; around the store, to the registry and even on outside, as far as the lot restricted by the private property limit of the given seller. The shopping basket and shopping cart is the vehicle that supports this easing.
While it is made in many different designs, it is usually a gridded container, where customers can place objects. They are often provided with wheels, and are made in versions for parents, that allow children seating, and in motorized versions to help people with physical challenges. It negotiates a limit of products that the customer might buy: If there was no cart, customers could only buy what they could carry. Small carts can only be filled to a certain degree, and large carts enable larger purchases.
Often the shopping cart is made of cheap materials to avoid embedding it with inherent value. Some even require tokens or small deposits to unlock to avoid theft. We rarely see people away from a store with a shopping cart. In this way, we can see that their inherent function is only normalized within the store, even though it has the same function as a helping/carrying vehicle outside the store.
While shopping carts help us transform generic goods into a personalized choice, they are not in themselves a personal item. In the store, they are passed from owner to owner, once they have fulfilled their purpose. This both signifies them as enablers of economic transactions rather than part of the economy itself, and also signifies the impersonal nature of supporting technologies. While this impersonal nature is part of its functionality, it also means that the former or future use is not a part of the mental landscape and the bacteria that they pass on by, is rarely considered.
Since the pandemic, this technology has gained much attention as customers are often required to use them in order to maintain distance and shopping carts regulate the amount of customers in some stores. This change of policies will be one of our starting points for a further exploration of the topic.
The digital shopping cart and the birth of online shopping
As the analog shopping carts filled with toilet paper and pasta were one of the many symbolic images of the current pandemic in some countries, people did not only fill their analog shopping carts with goods, but also their digital shopping carts in online shops. According to TechCrunch, e-commerce has increased in sales by 49% in April, with online grocery shopping jumping up by 110%.
The option of online shopping was developed in the early stages of the internet, making it possible to assemble items in a digital shopping cart list in order to checkout with a computer processed payment once one has finished shopping. Nowadays, almost everything can be ordered online as items are shipped from many places in the world directly to the buyer’s doorstep. And since the analog shopping cart has become symbolic for the act of shopping in many parts of the world, the symbol of the cart has been adapted to the buttons in online shops, that users have to click in order to add something to their digital cart.
Since there is a digital and an analog version of the shopping cart, we decided to explore both of these dimensions during the next few days. Both versions have been adapted with various innovations during the past decades, one example being Amazon's patent of the 1-Click technique to enable faster buying procedures. As both versions of the shopping cart are experiencing an increase in usage and symbolic meaning during the current pandemic, we want to investigate the structuring aspects of the (two) technologies. Furthermore, the lines between the analog and the digital shopping cart are blurring, as physical shopping carts in supermarkets are equipped with interface and scanning devices and scales to enable self checkout shopping.
One similarity between the two, we have already found out about, is that both versions of the shopping cart are often abandoned. While most people probably know the experience of filling an online shopping cart with various items and then leaving the web page without buying them, physical shopping carts are often found in ditches, bushes or at the beach. This phenomenon has been documented by the artist Julian Montague, collaging abandoned shopping carts in his book and exhibition “The Stray Shopping Carts Of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification.”
However, racing with online shopping carts doesn’t seem to be possible just yet.
0 Comments9 Minutes
Fight social distancing virtually – Do it with the ‘gram.
In time of COVID-19 and social distancing, technologies such as Instagram have not only supported us in much needed social interactions but provided new ways to organize the daily life of the user base digitally. When we started to look into the development of instagram’s features, how instagram is organizing our lives during COVID-19 and the increase in usage of the Live Function, we see a potential to further investigate the live function of Instagram from a socio-material perspective.
With the emergence of Covid-19 and the global human isolation, people started to find new ways to interact with each other. “Live” streaming on Instagram being one of them. Although this feature was not used as much before the pandemic, the need for human interaction has increased the “live” usage by 70% globally over the past few months (business insider, 2020). The use of “live” videos has enabled sports coaches, cooks, businesses, politicians and more to stay in contact with their public and stimulate human interaction. To enable people to still have activities other than their work and families, instagram users started to create live content for people to pursue their daily sport practices, their passion for cooking and to keep up with the outside world.
https://www.wmagazine.com/story/coronavirus-quarantine-instagram-live-trend-celebrities/
However, before we start discussing if and how Instagram’s “live” function is organized and organizing or if and how the usage is affecting us, we want to take a step back and dive into the historic development of Instagram’s feature set to provide a better understanding of how Instagram’s potentially evolved.
2010 – The photo-sharing platform
In 2010, Instagram emerged as a photo-sharing platform (Lup, Trup & Rosenthal, 2015, p. 247) with the idea to support the cultural trend of pictorial communication. At the beginning the feature set focused on taking and editing pictures and sharing them on a profile (Sheldon & Bryant, 2016, p. 89). However, Instagram has fastly reached an attractive user base, and added possibilities to organize the growing user generated content through hashtags for categorizing and making pictures visible to the right user base (see Sheldon & Bryant, 2016, p. 89). The popularity of Instagram, especially among younger generations, seems to be based on the continuous user-driven as well as user-focused innovations and is reflected in the fast-growing user base, which attracted the attention of competing social networking services.
2012 - Instagram acquisition
In April 2012 Instagram was acquired by Facebook. The original idea of Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, was to maintain Instagram independent bringing the team aboard, but this idea evaporated from the beginning because it was so tiny that it needed Facebook’s resources to stay afloat. In fact, at that time, Instagram only had 13 employed people and so far did not generate any revenue. The users were “only” 30 000 before the acquisition and, just after one month, they became 50 000. Nevertheless, the problem of revenues remained. For this reason, Emily White, the director of operations, said that it was necessary to concentrate in “capture and share the world’s moments”, which effectively was the “cool” factor that allowed Instagram to get thousands users in such a short time. In fact, only one year later, users became 150 000. From this moment, Instagram introduced sponsored post advertising which allowed it to get more revenues. Moreover, new features were introduced: first of all, in May 2013, “photo tagging” and “photo of you”, which were already present on Facebook, were added and, after one month, Instagram also launched the possibility of sharing videos of 3-15 seconds. However, there were much more changes to come.
2013 - The battle against Snapchat
In 2013, Facebook made an offer to Snapchat's founders to buy it for $ 3 billion. However, these refused, whereupon Mark Zuckerberg simply copied the main ideas of Snapchat and added them to Instagram. If imitation is the highest form of recognition, as Oscar Wilde once remarked, Instagram has really praised Snapchat the last few years. The similarities to the stories function on Snapchat are undeniable. Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom also admitted that Snapchat deserves all the credit, but also pointed out that it was not about who invented which feature first. It's about a new format and how to use it in your network and make it something unique. Videos on Instagram have recently become a central component of every content strategy. After the maximum length for videos has recently been increased to 60 seconds, Instagram is expanding the video function. The increasing number of Instagram users has led the social network to already introduce Instagram Live Videos in spring 2017, following in the footsteps of its big brother Facebook.
Aurora De Martin, Emaele de Quatrebarbes, Lara Schulte, Marco Ubalducci & Selma Vuckic
0 Comments6 Minutes
Communicating in times of COVID-19
How Zoom videoconferencing has ventured its way into our life… and is here to stay? Lessons from history.
Coming together as international, interdisciplinary students from four countries, we are going to get on a cultural journey looking at and assessing the effects of a technology or media. During the preparation of this summer school, all members of our group chose one technology that they were interested in and analyzed it from different perspectives of interest. Drawing on these technologies, we came together as a group with a basic understanding of socio-technological entanglements, heightened through the current pandemic. But how were we able to talk to each other face-to-face when the borders of the countries we reside in are still closed? Well, our lecturers chose Zoom videoconferencing as the way to go.
Interestingly, our group entailed different but still very similar technologies. Among these were earphones (especially noise-canceling earphones), the TV, Microsoft Teams and... Zoom. Without even realizing it, we started to talk about Zoom and how we feel about using it day in and out for our lectures, our private life, or our work. While Zoom enables us to hold this Summer School even though we are in the middle of a global pandemic, there were also several factors that our team members felt discomforted with. For example, Zoom strains our battery – not only the battery of our phones but also our own "battery". Moreover, we lose the ability to focus on a lecture, missing “real” interaction.
Being a part of a network, only possible to use with internet access and a personal device to log in with, Zoom is only one application of a bigger network of communication technologies. Inspired by a lecture from Prof. Dr. Claus Pias, we started to think about the historical development of such communication tools. Did you know that the radio, the TV, and the telephone were all developed within 20 years during the late 18th century? Well we certainly were not aware of this. The basic idea for videoconferencing was only developed slightly later during the 1930s when the telephone became widely popular and accessible. But what drove those developments? Why did Mr. Bell see the need to develop the telephone? And why did somebody want to develop an alternative for telephony by inventing videoconferencing? Well we think that such technological developments were always driven by societal development – for example the great immigration waves from Europe to the US. Back then, people were searching for vicinity and proximity to their loved ones, looking for a feeling of home and comfort, for example the voice of your relatives or pictures of their home country. Throughout history, these technologies have changed their purpose continuously. The underlying technology was constantly developed, only the terminology used to describe it remained unchanged – think about the several artefacts all referred to as a phone.
Swedish Prime Minister Tage Erlander using an Ericsson videophone to speak with Lennart Hyland, a popular TV show host (1969). Image via method shop
Zoom as one of the most popular solutions for videoconferencing was originally developed as a conferencing tool for companies. As an add-on to normal telephone conferences, companies were enabled to hold face-to-face meetings with members from all over the world. Face-to-face communication produced a feeling of personal proximity and community.
Nowadays though Zoom is used for several private and work-related meetings. Different than our ancestors adopting the telephone, we were forced to adapt Zoom within days. Driven by the global rise of the COVID-19 pandemic, most companies and universities quickly transferred to the video-conferencing platform. Leaving users with no time to adjust, an interesting effect could be observed: People started to compare Zoom to other communication tools and were dissatisfied with the “new normal”. Suddenly people craved for “social noise” such as a loud street or cafeteria. This effect is also known as the historical narrative of loss.
So, let us take a step back. Before trying to analyze and judge the technology of Zoom, we want to try to understand it better from a technological, historical, and societal perspective. Oftentimes, politicians and innovators believe that the investment in technology will solve all related issues (as we can also see with the current search for a vaccine for the Sars-Cov-2 virus). However, this ignores the drivers of the development of new technology. Because in the end a technology (at the moment) does not develop itself, it does not “know” how to improve or change if not for a smart coder or technician. Thus, this week, we want to take a holistic perspective on the technology of Zoom, how we as individuals perceive it, feel about it, and think about it.
"See you" tomorrow!
Alma, Bea, Davide, Karolina & Oskar
0 Comments6 Minutes