Friday, May 5, 2023

Covid Chronicles. Chapter 33: Zoom in Person


Read chapter 32 here

Photo submitted by friend

Tuesday, May 5, 2020 


Eric Yuan, the founder of Zoom, a now wildly popular video conferencing software, emigrated from China to the United States in 1997. Even though he spoke little English, he landed a job with a small Silicon Valley company. Now he has a net worth of $5.7 billion. His company employs more than 2500 people. Quite the immigration success story. And quite the irony to have a president whose primary goal in place strict limits on who is able to enter the United States, with at least one exception.

 “We should have more people from Norway,” he proclaimed at a White House meeting in January 2018. 

And now, to distract us from his horrendous handling of the coronavirus pandemic, he’s once again ramping up the China blame game. Granted, Chinese leaders deserve censure for their muzzling of scientists, health care workers, and journalists – not to mention hoodwinking their own citizens – but it’s not as though the Trump administration is doing a ‘great job’ – as our president emphatically insists on a daily basis – for the rest of the world to emulate. Hardly. Trump is a font of lies, misinformation, rumors, and just plain nuttiness


 A great leader would not sow seeds of division. He wouldn’t have implemented an ‘America First’ policy. Fighting the coronavirus requires cooperation among all countries of the world. 

The event took place yesterday. Apparently, Trump felt his base wouldn’t approve of U.S. participation. Government by cretins. 

OK, so I got a little bit sidetracked here, veering off into a Trump rant. An easy thing to do nowadays. Let me get back to my original focus. At the same time that Zoom and other similar products have become a popular video conferencing software for keeping people connected, it has also come in for some criticism. Some of it is deserved, some not. With ‘safer-at-home’ restrictions placed on public gatherings during the pandemic, these programs have become a necessary substitute during the pandemic. Starting in mid-March, the Dane County Board of Supervisors has used GoToMeeting to conduct its formal business, including committee meetings. The collective learning curve wasn’t as steep as I initially thought it would be. The board’s second virtual meeting went very smoothly, helped by the fact that the agenda included only the items most critical to the county’s operation. The major drawback is that it creates a challenge, some would say a hindrance, to public participation. People can’t decide to show up at meetings at the last minute. They need to register in advance and be ready to go when the item on which they want to speak comes up on the agenda. A Covid variation of phone a friend on ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire?’ 

The popularity of Zoom has been accompanied by the proliferation of the Zoombombers, people whose primary goal is to intrude on a meeting or conversation in order to disrupt it, often bombarding the unsuspecting group with racial, ethnic and religious epithets. Call them the party crashers of the Pandemic Age. Prior to the March 19th virtual board meeting, office staff learned that a local anti-jail group planned to conduct such a disruption, but the GoToMeeting software gives the moderator of a meeting firm control over who can participate. Zoom does not offer, as yet, such a safeguard. 

The Usual Suspects’ Zoom sessions have occurred without any intrusion. Not that we expected any problems. I’m sure Zoombombers tend to go after groups that fit a certain profile: people of color, religious minorities, those who have a mission that is thoroughly at odds with their own twisted philosophies. Our latest Zoom session took place on a beautiful Friday afternoon. JoAnna and I decided not to participate at home but drive to Madison’s east side to join Carol and Carrie in their driveway. I’m holding JoAnna’s iPhone, which is not an especially useful device for Zoom. First of all, with the sun in my eyes, I could barely see the screen, and with an iPhone, only the person speaking shows up on the screen. Not sure how that works when two people are talking at the same time. Carrie and Carol used a laptop to participate. Of course, it’s not necessary to observe the other participants in order to join the conversation, and I actually preferred it that way. The important thing was that JoAnna and I could hear everything being said and respond appropriately. 

As for privacy concerns, another area where Zoom has taken a beating, my philosophy hasn’t changed. If you are going to participate in any type of social media – Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Zoom – don’t expect to inhabit a privacy cocoon. That’s not gonna happen. Our phones and other devices track our every movement.

Spectrum, 5/2/2020

Read chapter 34 here

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