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

by Mark Nunes (Editor), Cassandra Ozog (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798765108284
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	07/11/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	880 KB

About the Author

Mark Nunes is Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Appalachian State University. His publications include Error: Glitch, Noise, and Jam in New Media Cultures (Bloomsbury, 2012) and Cyberspaces of Everyday Life (2006).

Cassandra Ozog is an instructor in the Department of Sociology and Social Studies at the University of Regina, in Treaty 4 Territory, Canada.
Mark Nunes is Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Appalachian State University, USA. He is author of Cyberspaces of Everyday Life (2006) and editor of a collection of essays entitled Error: Glitch, Noise, and Jam in New Media Cultures (Bloomsbury, 2012). He has written extensively at the intersection of cultural studies and new media studies, with recent work exploring the co-constitution of human and algorithmic agencies.
Cassandra Ozog is an instructor in the Department of Sociology and Social Studies at the University of Regina, in Treaty 4 Territory in Regina, Canada. She recently completed her interdisciplinary PhD in Sociology and Media Studies. Her research interests include representations of mental illness and disability in the media, digital methodologies, and popular culture, specifically horror and sci-fi film, fiction, and television.

Table of Contents

List of Figures
List of Tables
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Performative Logic of Zoom
Mark Nunes (Appalachian State University, USA) and Cassandra Ozog (University of Regina, Canada)

Part 1 : Zoom Embodiments
Introduction
Mark Nunes (Appalachian State University, USA) and Cassandra Ozog (University of Regina, Canada)
1. The Face of the Network: Subjectivity, Securitization, and the Production of Sad Affect on Zoom
Ricky D. Crano (University of California, Irvine, USA)
2. Mediating the Death of a Parent: Zoom and the Deathbed Vigil
Susan A. Sci (Regis University, USA)
3. Zoom Etiquette Guides: Negotiating Between Workplace Professionalism and Gendered Homeplace Surveillance in the Videoconferencing Borderlands
Jacquelyne Thoni Howard (Tulane University, USA)

Part 2: Staging Zoom
Introduction
Mark Nunes (Appalachian State University, USA) and Cassandra Ozog (University of Regina, Canada)
4. Proxemics and Nonverbal Communication Dilemmas on Zoom
John A. McArthur (Furman University, USA)
5. Zoom's Performative Window: Affordances and Constraints
Daniel Paul O'Brien (University of Essex, UK)
6. Eigengrau: Reimagining Videoconferencing as a “Slow Platform”
Craig Fahner (New York University, USA)

Part 3: Transverse Networks and the Neoliberal University
Introduction
Mark Nunes (Appalachian State University, USA) and Cassandra Ozog (University of Regina, Canada)
7. The Zoom Machinic in Postdigital Learning Ecologies: An Exploration of Educators' Experiences via Three Case Studies
Kathryn Grushka (The University of Newcastle, Australia), Rachel Buchanan (The University of Newcastle, Australia), Michael Whittington (The University of Newcastle, Australia), and Rory Davis (The University of Newcastle, Australia)
8. “Networked Togetherness, I Guess ¯\_(?)_/¯”: Subverting the Academic Zoom Chat through the Subcultural Collective
Alexis-Carlota Cochrane (McMaster University, Canada) and Theresa N. Kenney (McMaster University, Canada)
9. Stage Directions and Snarky Comments: Shadow Networks in Zoom Meetings Throughout the COVID-19 Pandemic
Heather J. Carmack (Mayo Clinic, USA), Heather M. Stassen (Daemen University, USA), Tennley A. Vik (University of Nevada, Reno, USA), and Jocelyn M. DeGroot (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, USA)

Part 4: Unstable Connections
Introduction
Mark Nunes (Appalachian State University, USA) and Cassandra Ozog (University of Regina, Canada)
10. Locked In or Locked Out? Aging Migrants Enacting Autonomous and Dependent Co-presence on Zoom during the Pandemic
Earvin Charles B. Cabalquinto (Monash University, Australia)
11. “Zoom Saved All Our Lives”: A Case of Nonprofit Resilient Organizing During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Evgeniya Pyatovskaya (University of South Florida, USA)
12. (Un)expected Errors
Mark Nunes (Appalachian State University, USA) and Cassandra Ozog (University of Regina, Canada)

Index

Editorial Reviews

After the Zoom hegemony during Covid, this rich collection describes the unfolding of a diverse techno culture. How should remote social interaction be designed? Breaking out of the spectator grid is one. Less performative self-monitoring, more critical engagement another. Listening carefully to users, as the authors have done, turbans out to be key if we want to create hybrid togetherness—so necessary in this divisive techno-world.” —Geert Lovink, Media Theorist, Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

From the Publisher