Episode 11 - Are New Year’s Resolutions Worth It?
Transcript
Ellie: 0:00
Hi, I'm Ellie Anderson,
David: 0:01
And I'm David Peña-Guzmán. Welcome to Overthink.
Ellie: 0:05
The podcast where two friends,
David: 0:06
who who are also professors
Ellie: 0:08
put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday.
David: 0:11
Because big ideas are within everyone's reach.
Ellie: 0:18
Happy New Year, David. How's it going?
David: 0:21
I'm doing great, just getting in that mental space of going back to work after the holidays.
Ellie: 0:27
Yes, which for us does not mean going back to the office, but going back on Zoom.
David: 0:33
Sweet Zoom.
Ellie: 0:35
It looks like 2021 is going to be another Zoom year for us, at least for the foreseeable future. And I think that's the case for many.
David: 0:41
Yeah. And my university sent us an official email saying that we should plan to go back in person in the fall of 2021, but that we should also plan to be on Zoom, not just for the spring, but also for the totality of the summer.
Ellie: 0:55
Wow.
David: 0:56
Looking at a return of late August.
Ellie: 0:59
Okay. Yeah, I think a lot of us are using Zoom, not just for things like that, you know, like classes, you and I are teaching on Zoom, but pretty much for everything else, right? We've got Zoom happy hours, or at least we did early in the pandemic. And then people decided that Zoom happy hours weren't particularly fun. And we just retreated to our own living rooms.
David: 1:17
I have not decided that, I'm still living for the happy hours on Zoom.
Ellie: 1:22
Oh, my God invite me. I- mine have completely petered out.
David: 1:26
I said, happy hours. Uh, no, but I mean, for pretty much anything, for chatting with my family, it's Zoom, for talking to my colleagues, it's Zoom, for collaborations, it's Zoom. So I feel like I'm breathing and eating Zoom. Like I'm a Zoom subject now.
Ellie: 1:44
Absolutely. Zoom therapy, Zoom doctor's visits, all kinds of stuff happening on Zoom. And of course Zoom is here being used as a stand-in for any other kind of video conferencing technology. But I think it's really come to the fore. It was recently named the top app of 2020. And as we said, it looks like 2021 will not be that different. But Zoom is not exactly a neutral technology that allows us to carry on exactly before, just in virtual space. Instead, I mean, I've been thinking a lot about how it changes the nature of social dynamics.
David: 2:16
Today we're talking about that change. What are the politics of the Zoom and how is it altering our lives?
Ellie: 2:24
Equally importantly, how is it altering our understanding of ourselves?
David: 2:29
And finally, even if we might have reasonable concerns about the politics of Zoom and how it's changing our lives, has it also brought with it certain benefits that we have to recognize?
Ellie: 2:41
And maybe hold onto, even after we are able to socialize in person again.
David: 2:45
Once we Zoom out. Ellie, let's begin by thinking about how Zoom is changing our lives on a grand scale. So for example, one of the things that I've noticed is that, especially in my interactions with my students, Zoom has really blurred, and one could even say destroyed, that public-private distinction because suddenly I have to teach my classes and in doing so, I welcomed students into my home. So they see the background, they see what is happening in my living room. They get to meet my partner who might be walking around in the house. And so that comfort that I once had about having a clean separation between my home life and my work life, no longer holds.
Ellie: 3:34
Wait, you're not using a virtual background?
David: 3:36
So, I don't know what's happening with my computer, but whenever I turn on the virtual background function, it thinks that my face is the background rather than the-
Ellie: 3:46
Yes!
David: 3:47
You saw this. Yes.
Ellie: 3:49
We actually posted that on our social media for the ghosting episode, picture of you with like a constellation as a face.
David: 3:55
Yeah. So my skin is red as the background. And I'm actually wondering here about the algorithm that Zoom uses for differentiating background versus foreground, because for some reason it turns to me into the background. Then you can see everything in the background except me. Um, and so I don't know if it's Zoom or if it's my computer, I can't use a virtual background. And so it means that I either have to corner myself into a space where like they can't see the dirty plates that I didn't do after breakfast or where they don't see my shoes or whatever, or I just have to bite the bullet and accept that my students will effectively see the I live, which you know, I'm very proud of the way I live.
Ellie: 4:39
Uh, yeah. Check out the Millennial Homemaking episode and you'll hear about your special plans.
David: 4:44
Yes. But again, I think we've both been trained to really keep a clean separation, a boundary, between our home and our work when it comes to students.
Ellie: 4:55
Definitely. And I think that's true in general. I mean, I really do think it's the case that Zoom is blurring the public-private distinction. Even people who already worked from home may not be used to suddenly having their coworkers in their actual home space, right? Even if you use a virtual background, there is something different about suddenly talking to your coworkers while you are at your kitchen table, right? Like I write and research a lot from home, but I'm not used to having meetings at home too. It's very weird.
David: 5:25
Yeah. And then there is this lack of control that you have over your environment, right? I know that when I go to a classroom in a university, there's already a lot
of controls in place: 5:33
only students are going to be around, the rooms are typically controlled for sound, and they have good AC, but when I do work on Zoom, there are a ton of things that are no longer under my control. So for example, my neighbors upstairs have a couple of three and four year old kids that effectively have hooves for feet and they just like run and they make this really loud noise that I just can't control, or there is ambulances, or cars speeding outside, that, you know, are just going to be in the background.
Ellie: 6:08
Yeah, it reminds me of something that philosopher Paul Virilio talks about, which is the shrinking of distances, the way that in our postmodern capitalist society, all surfaces of the globe are directly present to each other at all times. You might think about that in terms of TV, right? I can be anywhere in the world, almost instantly, by virtue of watching a TV show or a movie, thanks to Netflix. But Zoom even shrinks those distances further. I think, for instance, about my clothing while I'm on Zoom. A lot of people have talked about the way that business on top and cozy on the bottom. This is what I call the mullet outfit.
David: 6:44
Ah, okay. back in the day, I had a little rat tail, so be careful about the mullet diss, cause I, like, come very, very close to have had a mullet multiple times in my life.
Ellie: 6:55
I can say it firsthand, it was cute when you had your rat tail.
David: 6:59
Okay. So let me ask you a question. Be honest, even though I know your students and my students are probably listening to our podcast, have you done the mullet teaching?
Ellie: 7:11
Oh yeah, absolutely.
David: 7:12
You'll have like, a blazer on top and then like no pants?
Ellie: 7:16
Not no pants, but I'll have like sweatpants on, or pajamas.
David: 7:19
Is that the right way to use that metaphor of the mullet?
Ellie: 7:22
The mullet is, uh, it's like business in the front party, in the back, right. Here it's business on top party on the bottom, but it's not party. It's just cozy pajamas.
David: 7:32
So it's like a, it's like a faux mullet, not a full mullet.
Ellie: 7:34
Yeah. One of the things that I bought at the beginning of the pandemic was more lounge pants that kind of look professional, but that are actually really cozy. In fact, I'm wearing some now. They're made out of sweater material, but they're pants and they're stretchy. You have an elastic waist. I don't think I've, you know, put a zipper on more than a handful of times in the entire pandemic, but it's not just about the shirt and the bottoms, right. It's also about, especially as a woman, it's about jewelry. It's about styling of my hair. It's about earrings or makeup perhaps. For instance, like with my hair, I have taken to just making sure that the front is brushed and slightly curled, and then who knows what the heck is going on in the back. It's either completely flat or sticking up in all directions, but nobody's seeing the back of my head. So does it even matter?
David: 8:22
In the words of drag queen Eureka, your kitchen's a mess.
Ellie: 8:28
Exactly.
David: 8:29
Um, but you know, there are all those videos of people having these blooper sort of situations over Zoom. Like, I don't know if you've seen the one about this woman who is a teacher like us. And she's talking to her students and then her partner walks in the background in his underwear, going to the fridge to try to get a beer or something. She-
Ellie: 8:51
she-
David: 8:52
realizes, but she can't control it cause she's in the middle of lecturing. And you see the desperation and the frustration on her face. And then her partner realizes and tries to run out of the frame, but runs headfirst into the fridge. But I feel like there's a bunch of these situations-
Ellie: 9:13
Oh yeah, famous British correspondent whose little girls came into his office while he was on the nighttime news, right? But there's some benefit about having meetings and having classes in your actual home. I love the idea that I can change a load of laundry in between classes, but it's also kind of weird to, on a brief break, make my bed, you know. It's really diminishing the distance between my professor self, and other elements of my identity, even, for example, the fact that I live in Los Angeles, but I teach 40 miles away. And so there's usually a really strong distinction signaled by my commute, which is either by train or by car. And I just don't have that anymore. I don't have that time to sort of gear up and get into that head space.
David: 10:02
And in the past, I was used to knowing that I would have 40 minutes on Bard, which is the Metro in San Francisco, and I would have 40 minutes to read before class because it takes 40 minutes for me to get from my house to campus. And it was this ritual that I had associated with teaching. And it's not the same when I'm preparing now, right before a class, you know, gathering my thoughts, making some final notes. And I think it goes to that point that you're talking about vis-a-vis Virilio, which is that shrinking of space, where space has become almost this vanishing point, because all points on the globe can be connected simultaneously.
Ellie: 10:42
Totally. And one other thing that really weirds me out about Zoom is that there's so little opportunity for smalltalk, and also for different groupings. So for instance, if I have a Zoom happy hour-- but back when I had a few earlier in the pandemic, maybe this is like my cry for help, that I need more Zoom happy hours.
David: 11:01
We'll do one Ellie. And invite you.
Ellie: 11:04
Thank you. Thank you. Um, but usually it's like different people are trickling in at different times and you can kind of catch up with one friend here, and then catch up with another friend there. But with Zoom, it's just, everyone is completely flattened in these equal boxes. And there are actually some apps that have tried to compensate for this by offering more cocktail party type settings, but they haven't really caught on the way that Zoom has. And I think it's just so strange to always be seeing everybody from the same angle, namely facing the front. And then also to really not have that opportunity for these kinds of micro-interactions that happen in passing.
David: 11:42
Yeah. And even things like body language, right. Typically, and this is something that we have learned from research in linguistics and the philosophy of language, that a lot of the way in which we convey meaning to one another is not really through propositions. It's not through words and verbs and adverbs, it's actually through the way in which we carry our body. Do you have a posture that is welcoming? Do you give somebody the cold shoulder? Are you paying attention to them? And does your body convey that? And it's extremely difficult to read body language on Zoom. Even if you have clear visual access to somebody, vis-a-vis their camera.
Ellie: 12:20
Absolutely. And even on top of that, because what you're saying is already a really interesting point relative to the sense of vision, I think there's an important sense in which the other senses are lost by just having access to somebody's face on Zoom. We read faces primarily through visual cues, but we read bodies through more multi-sensory integration and that's actually especially true of our own awareness of our own bodies. One way that I am aware of my own body more during quarantine is that I smell my own pits more, cause I forget to wear a deodorant. But aside from that, I'm really lacking the multisensory integration that I'm used to.
David: 12:58
Well, in that case, I'm sure your students are thanking the lack of multi- multi-sensorial integration of the experience in the context of their education? Um- No, but I like the phrase that you use that it's flattening social experiences, because it's flattening in the sense that it's reducing it to a specific sensory apparatus or a sensory modality, but it's also flattening it horizontally in the sense that everybody is on the same plane, right? There is no way to add differentiation, moments of intensity, moments of distance, moments of silence, because there's only one person that can speak at a time unless you break up groups.
Ellie: 13:38
For sure. Yeah. I think a lot of the textures of social life are lost through Zoom. It encourages this kind of homogeneity and it also encourages what media theorist Dana Boyd calls context collapse. In the age of Zoom, because of this flattening of distances and shrinking of them, there is this collapsing of context.
David: 13:58
Well, and here, I'm thinking about the ways in which Zoom is almost forcing our mode of communication to itself be algorithmic, , right? It's taking out that human element, uh, which in this case is something like context, which encompasses everything from sensory modalities other than just vision, but also, ways of communicating that are not just, again, through propositions like winking or smiling or affects, um, that layer dimension of human communication that we know from research, for example, on AI, is what differentiates humans from machines. Machines are very bad at that. And so sometimes I feel as if Zoom turns my communication robotic or machinic.
Ellie: 14:43
Ah, absolutely. Yeah. Zoom is turning us all into machines.
David: 14:49
You know, that function on Gmail where they will finish your sentences for you.
Ellie: 14:53
Oh yes!
David: 14:54
It's super annoying. And the first time that it happened, that I saw that I was like, "How dare you tell me what I'm thinking. Also, that's actually a very good formulation of what I was trying to say." So yes, I accepted.
Ellie: 15:09
Did you read my mind?
David: 15:10
Yeah. You know, we have all these discussions about, "Oh, when will AI become human?" And all of this is making me think that at the same time, as AI is approaching humanity, unsuccessfully on my view, human communication is also sort of approaching artificiality more and more because of the influence of these technologies.
Ellie: 15:33
Which might make you think that suddenly, human communication is more straightforward, but that's actually not the case at all. Zoom makes communication much more complex and challenging in many cases.
David: 15:44
Yeah. For example, when I teach, I cannot really follow the discussion, uh, live, and at the same time, follow the chat discussion that's happening.
Ellie: 15:55
My God. I know. And students think they can, but they can't either, given what we know about the psychology of multitasking.
David: 16:02
Yeah, and just the nature of attention, right? I can not be lecturing about French philosophy or about animal studies or about the philosophy of consciousness and at the same time, follow this side chat about, you know, what happened on the latest episode of God knows what series that my students are watching.
Ellie: 16:24
Well, and even when the chat is about the course content, which in my classes, it generally is, and students will often make really compelling points-- I think the chat function provides some great opportunities for students who might not feel like their comment rises to the level of something that happened in main discussion or maybe they're a little bit more shy, so I think that's great-- but even at that, I still sometimes need a pause to sort of catch up with the chat or there will be this conversation that happens completely without my knowing it, because I'm not aware of the chat at the time it's happening.
David: 16:52
Yeah. And so it adds an element of choppiness, right. Where you have to stop and then you have to say, okay let me go back to the chat and see if I missed anything. So again, it's just making me think about the way in which the specific functions, the specific design of Zoom, makes communication actually much more complicated and much more frail where things can go wrong.
Ellie: 17:13
For sure. Yeah. And I mean, I have to say, I am so lucky with my students. I had an incredible group of students both in spring 2020 when we went online, and then this past fall, my students were really present. But one thing I've heard from friends who teach, especially at larger colleges, is that a lot of students have been turning their cameras off. So I don't know what your thoughts are on that, David. I don't have an explicit policy against turning your camera off, and I tell students if you need to turn it off for a minute or two, no problem. But most of my students luckily do keep their cameras on all the time. And I really feel like I'm talking to a group and talking with a group.
David: 17:48
Yeah. So I've had a couple of meetings with undergraduate students where some of them seem to be in the habit of turning off their camera. Now, no problem. I do not know what their living circumstances are. I don't know if they have space to claim as their own in their home, don't know if they have needs that are best served by turning off the camera. But when you see a sea of black squares just turning in front of you, it is psychologically disorienting.
Ellie: 18:17
You're literally talking to a void.
David: 18:19
Yeah, talking to a void.
Ellie: 18:20
It's the abyss. And it's not going to talk back.
David: 18:22
Yeah. That's exactly right. Nietzsche was wrong. When I look into the abyss, it's actually just Zoom and nobody says anything. You feel like you're in a nightmarish, like Malevich, painting, you know, the black square from the early 20th century.
Ellie: 18:35
Of course.
David: 18:36
It's just abstractionist teaching. That's what we're talking about. Because sometimes I do wonder, are they there? Are they not? Am I, in fact speaking into the abyss?
Ellie: 18:48
Yeah, so that just seems to be really alienating and it's not only alienating us from each other, but it's also alienating us from ourselves. This is something that I have been thinking a lot about, especially over the summer and fall when I was writing a bit about this, how is it that the self-view in particular, on Zoom, the fact that suddenly I'm an audience member in my own classroom, and I can see myself while I'm talking, is affecting my experience? I feel like it's having some really damaging effects on me.
David: 19:18
It is so distracting, and I know that you recently published an article about this. And the title of it is "You're Not Staring at Yourself on Zoom, You're Judging Yourself." So let's talk about the argument that you make about this, because it turns on this self-view function that I do think is damaging.
Ellie: 19:39
Talk about my own work? Ugh, twist my arm. So I published this piece in November called "You're Not Staring at Yourself on Zoom, You're Judging Yourself" in Forge magazine, which is like the self development magazine that Medium publishes.
David: 19:57
Hashtag goals!
Ellie: 19:59
Oh, it's so rare for academics to actually get paid for pieces that like, when I found out that pay me, I was just like, what? This is actually the second piece I published with them, but still it was great.
David: 20:11
Yeah. For people who don't know this, academics do a lot of free labor in terms of our research.
Ellie: 20:16
We do not get paid for our articles. Yes.
David: 20:18
Like there are corporations that make millions and millions of dollars publishing our research and we see zero of it.
Ellie: 20:25
And then you go into journalism and it's like, "Oh wow. You actually get paid at least sometimes for pieces." So anyway, um, I basically thought this piece was going to go viral and then it got a decent reception, but it sort of didn't go viral and Medium has like this weird thing called Claps, You can publicly clap for a piece. And got so few claps, like the other piece I wrote for Medium, which was about the culture of bailing, got like a thousand claps or something, which is pretty decent. This one got a lot of informal, good feedback, and a lot of use, it only has 75 claps. So I'm just going to chalk that up to bad algorithms.
David: 21:02
The emoji version of the Zoom clap where it's just-
Ellie: 21:05
Exactly.
David: 21:08
It-
Ellie: 21:09
Yes, no, but let me tell you why this piece was, was great and it should've gone more viral than it did. Um, yeah, so I am very concerned about the fact that Zoom and other video conferencing platforms generally show you yourself on screen. And to some extent, we need that. I mean, that's one way to avoid, for instance, the partner in the back, who's grabbing a beer in his underwear to use the example that you mentioned earlier. David.
David: 21:34
Oh, my God.
Ellie: 21:35
I think It's suddenly so strange to be working, teaching, and socializing and having this third person perspective on ourselves. We're not used to that. And especially for women and other folks who are encouraged to objectify ourselves from a young age, it's really easy to fixate on our own image, sometimes in a negative way, most often, I would say in a negative way, like, "Oh my God, do I really look like that?" And then even sometimes in a positive way, like, "Oh, wow, lookin' fire today," but either way there's judgment going on, right. And so our view of ourselves on Zoom is never neutral. It's always judgmental. And there is a ton of research that I talk about in the article that backs this.
David: 22:14
Yeah. So my experience is never fire. It's always eyes. It's just like, "Ooh, is that what I look like?" Um, and it reminds me of that very famous Lacanian discussion of the mirror stage when-
Ellie: 22:28
Shout out to Jacques Lacan, the mid-century French psychoanalyst.
David: 22:31
He writes about the importance of this kind of self-reflection that children experience in the mirror, typically at around age three or so, when they, for the first time, recognize that, "Oh, this is me and they form a unified sense of self vis-a-vis the reflection." And I feel like, of course, that's important in terms of child development, but once you are trapped in that mirror relationship, as we might be on Zoom, the effect is something else. Instead ofunifying subject, it starts disintegrating the subject so that you no longer relate to yourself or to this image of yourself as an image of yourself, it's actually an other self.
Ellie: 23:12
Yeah, absolutely. And that separation is really indicative of alienation. So one thing that comes to mind for me here is the existentialist tradition, where you have folks like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who talk a lot about the experience of being an object for others, and Sartre says in his famous account of the look, which bears some similarities to the Lacanian mirror stage that you're talking about, David, I first get a sense of myself as an object when I see myself being looked at by other people. Before that, I'm just kind of going about my daily life as a subject. But when I see another person looking at me, I realized that I am an object among other objects in space, and Sartre says that there are two main
responses to this: 23:56
shame and pride. When I feel shame, it's because I suddenly feel crappy that I'm an object. It makes me feel small. When I feel pride, I'm sort of trying to positively adopt my object status and say, "Look at me, look at how great I am." And Beauvoir has an account of the way that women are encouraged to do this in her book The Second Sex, through the figure of what she calls the narcissist, but both Sartre and Beauvoir think that that pride reaction, or that narcissistic reaction, is still ultimately derivative of shame, because it's this desire to respond to feeling diminished by your object status by affirming yourself as an object. So it actually doesn't get you out of the problem at all, it's still a way of judging yourself negatively.
David: 24:41
And in Being and Nothingness, Sartre has that very famous, frequently cited passage about somebody looking through a keyhole in a door and looking at the scene that's unfolding on the other side. And so they're basically being Peeping Toms, right? This person is just like looking and seeing, but without being seen, and at some point, the person who is looking realizes that there is another person looking at them looking through the peephole.
Ellie: 25:12
They actually hear footfalls and they're like, "Oh, my God, somebody might be looking at me."
David: 25:16
Oh, okay. So I forget the details, but, he's very melodramatic about this moment and he's like, this is the moment where my being is liquified. So he has this whole theory of the liquification of the self when I realize that not only am I a subject who is capable of reducing others to an object of my gaze, but who is also capable of being reduced to an object of somebody else's gaze.
Ellie: 25:42
Yes. And Sartre says that actually is a very important moment of human existence because the fact is I am an object for others. So the problem is not that I am an object. The problem for Sartre is that I can't experience myself at the same time as both a subject and an object. He says that I'm always vacillating between the two experiences. And so with something like Zoom, where we are always faced with ourselves as an object, and it's not only other people seeing us, but it's also ourselves seeing ourselves as objects, we find it almost impossible, from a Sartrean perspective, to let our subjectivity unfold right? Like for instance, I find it really hard to carry on a sentence when I'm looking at myself. I have my self-view turned off right now, as we're speaking. I pretty much always do because I just can't concentrate when my self-view is on because I- my subjectivity is inhibited by my objectivity.
David: 26:37
Oh, you see, I'm the opposite. I'm basically my own muse on Zoom. I cannot begin a sentence unless I am staring deeply into my eyes and making a lifelong commitment to love myself. Uh, it's really what gets me through Zoom meetings. No, but I mean, to go back to this question about what you call self-objectification following this Sartrean line of thinking, I really wonder about what the effects are of getting trapped in this moment of self-objectification, because you point out that for Sartre, there is this ambivalence, right? We, we cannot sustain the ambiguity of being subject and object at the same moment. And so I just wonder what the effects of being trapped in that moment might be.
Ellie: 27:23
Yeah, So there are a lot of documented ones. So self-objectification has been linked to not only shame, which we've just discussed, but also to anxiety about one's appearance and to negative mood. It inhibits our agency as well as our confidence. And I think that the negative effects here are not distributed evenly among populations. This issue is especially high stakes, not only for women, and I think this would also be true of trans men and non-binary folks who were raised as girls, that we have been constantly taught from a young age to see ourselves as objects. I think it's also definitely an issue for BIPOC who are encouraged to see themselves as objects, because for instance, they may have to for safety purposes. For instance, if you're a black man who lives in a city, you might be more used to seeing yourself as an object than a white man would be, because you are concerned about, for instance, being seen by others as a threat. And I'm also thinking about those whose self-presentation may be in flux. People, for instance, who are having weight fluctuations, that they feel uncomfortable with, or folks going through gender transition, right? Seeing yourself you on Zoom could trigger dysphoria. Your self-presentation, and your sense of self are especially at odds.
David: 28:33
Yeah. And I think that's a really important point. So even if myself presentation may not be something that triggers a sense of dysphoria in me, there are a lot of subjects for whom that's a very real concern. And, in general, looking at yourself looking back at you must have an effect that is deep, and that I think can only be interpreted in psychoanalytic terms, because if we go back to the Lacanian account of the mirror stage, one of the things that Lacan says is that when the child recognizes himself or herself in the mirror, they develop a unified sense of their identity, of their bodily identity, right? All these sensations that they previously had, now they have a unified image to make sense of them. But the mirror is inverted, and so the child also gets the sense that this thing that is me is also weirdly off. There's something bizarre about it, and it's that inversion, and for Lacan, this is the source of violence and aggression and brutality.
Ellie: 29:38
Then you can say the same of Zoom because Zoom also inverts your image. So I'm seeing you David right now in your ordinary frontal self-view, but you are actually seeing yourself in a mirror image. Zoom inverts the image for you, but it doesn't invert the image for me. And it does that because we're so used to looking at ourselves in mirrors that if we see ourselves frontally, without that inversion, we tend to think we're like really ugly, right? There are documented negative effects of this. We're more comfortable and more positive about our inverted self.
David: 30:10
Yeah. And Lacan takes this even one step deeper and he argues that when the child sees themselves reflected in an inverted manner, they unconsciously recognize that they will never be at one with themselves, that there's always this glitch at the source of existence and subjectivity that the real, what he calls the real, can never be fully unified at the level of what he calls the imaginary, and so it introduces a kernel of violence and trauma at the source of the subject. And I think your piece hints at this.
Ellie: 30:47
I think that's so interesting because I do think there's a really important insight in the fact that ourselves are not continuous, right? And that they're not single, they're developing and in flux and fragmented and trace like, fictional even. At the same time, the way that Zoom presents that strikes me as a relatively detrimental version of it, and also relatively superficial, because I'm not seeing my whole mirror image, I'm just seeing the mirror image of say my face and shoulders. And I am also seeing what I take to be myself in the context of others, but I actually have a really bad read on how I'm appearing to others. So, for instance, we tend to attribute more emotional expressiveness to our own faces. And so I might think that I have sort of like stink face, but I'm actually like appearing perfectly neutral. And so my response to that may be to smile a bunch, but that's actually weird. So we're really bad at being quote, objective about ourselves even we see ourselves as objects.
David: 31:51
Oh, that's interesting. I hadn't thought about the fact that what we think is neutral is already a projection that is the result of a misreading of our own emotional expressivity. Oh my God. So like this whole time when I've just been like artificially smiling at you in order to appear neutral-
Ellie: 32:09
Yeah.
David: 32:10
you're freaked out. Yeah.
Ellie: 32:13
Your impression management doesn't actually work. Sorry, David. I'm not talking about you here. You have never struck me as like having weird expressions on Zoom. But in general, like we try to manage our impressions and we may do that somewhat successfully, but we're definitely not going to be doing it in a fully successful sense.
David: 32:29
One thing that I really like about your piece is that you put your finger on this problem, which is that we do not have the kind of centralized unity of experience in Zoom that we typically have in person, right? Like you only see a part of yourself, typically the face, it's limited to vision at the expense of other sensory modalities. And so ultimately it's a highly impoverished replication of experience, of the multi-sensorial, multi- dimensional manifold of experience.
Ellie: 33:00
Yes. I'm very inspired here by decades of feminist analysis that talks about the ways that women tend to have less of a unified sense of experience, because we are always seeing ourselves from the outside. So for instance, in her very famous essay, "Throwing Like a Girl," Iris Marion Young talks about the fact that when young girls are throwing balls, they tend to do so in a way that exhibits what she calls discontinuous unity. They, for instance, will isolate a given part of their body, like the arm, and throw just using the arm rather than putting their whole body into it. And she attributes that to the characteristics of young girls' socialization. And so this discontinuous unity, I think, is very evident on Zoom and I've been also really thinking a lot about this in terms of what contemporary philosopher Celine LeBoeuf calls bodily alienation. So in this great essay talking about the phenomenon of the thigh gap, and how there are like all of these thinspo websites that encourage having a thigh gap, which is just a small space between your legs when you're standing straight up, um, it's kind of encouraged as an ideal for women, LeBoeuf talks about how a really damaging effect of that is bodily alienation, where I'm no longer seeing my thighs as part of my body, as my instrument, my "I can," my way of moving in the world, but rather as objects, right? As things that I can work on, that I canaddress problem areas of, et cetera.
David: 34:33
Yeah, the other day I was in the bathroom and I almost dropped my phone and my thighs were like, "I got you girl." If I had had a thigh gap, disaster disaster. So I'm very thankful for my thigh fullness, I guess, my thigh bridge.
Ellie: 34:52
Yeah, absolutely. I think your comment really partakes of the broader discourse around body positivity that balances out things like the thigh gap, of people really embracing curves, embracing different body types, embracing fatness. And at the same time, I still have a lot of thoughts about how that can encourage objectification, because as it turns out, there's research that I draw on in this article that shows that, for instance, taking selfies leads to psychologically harmful effects, even if you're doing so in a way that is body positive, embracing your quote flaws.
David: 35:27
Well, and when you're engaging in selfies or looking at self-view on Zoom, you are mediating your experience through a technology that introduces a space, a gap, a distance, that produces that auto-alienation that leads to these downstream negative psychological, and I would add psychoanalytic, consequences.
Ellie: 35:48
Yeah, absolutely. There's always a level of mediation happening when we relate to ourselves, but the particular kind of alienation and/or maybe the particular degree of it that we have on things like Zoom, I think is a bad thing, to put it very bluntly.
David: 36:06
Well, and it varies along the lines of, as you said, class, race, gender, because of the norms of socialization to which different subjects are subjected before they even get to the point of taking selfies or looking at themselves on the self-view. So in connection to Marion Young's article "Throwing Like a Girl," it reminds me of a YouTube video that I watched, in which a couple of psychologists did very basic experiment. They asked 11 and 10 year old girls to run like a girl, in place.
Ellie: 36:40
Oh yeah, it was like that campaign for like Dove or something.
David: 36:43
I forget what it was. And, the 10, 11 year old girls, when told to run like a girl, they would run super fast, as one would run, when one is trying to run, but then by the early teen stage when girls confidence plummets, around middle school, if you asked 13 year old girls to run like a girl, they would run as others think girls run, so in a very stereotyped, weak kind of ridiculous manner. And so for them, that activity became something that was mediated through others' perception of them and their bodies.
Ellie: 37:22
And I think one thing to put in the mix here that we haven't mentioned as well is the fact that in many cases, for many folks on Zoom, there are also people in the background who are watching you on Zoom. And this, I think can be especially alienating when we bring class into it, for people who are living in somewhat cramped multi-generational households, where they don't have privacy, or for our first-generation students who they're having an abstract conversation about philosophy, right? And then a family member is cooking in the background. A family member is caretaking. A family member might be like, "What the hell are you doing, you know, on your Zoom call talking about these abstract concepts when there's more at work here." And so feeling also that sort of gaze of the Other, or the gazes of the, Other of the people of your household who are watching you on Zoom.
David: 38:11
Yeah. And I think that's interesting because it changes your relationship to them, right? So, uh, for the first time, I saw my partner do some of his work over Zoom, and I saw him in action and I was like, "Oh, this is a side of this person that I had not really seen before." And I also had a couple of students who did PowerPoint presentations for one of their assignment, where they recorded themselves on Zoom. And in a couple of cases, it was very clear that they were distracted by the fact that their parents or their siblings were in their room watching them. So their eyes would like look at the camera, but constantly look at the person in the room. And I think they were wondering, "Well, now they see me in my capacity as a student, which they haven't seen before," so it changes the dynamics of the relationship.
Ellie: 39:04
Yes. I have gotten the feedback that I have a different voice as a professor than I do as a friend, partner.
David: 39:11
Uh, yes. So my partner is like, "Oh, are you going to give me your professor voice?" And I'm like, what is that? But has it down to a science and so he can mimic me, and after he pointed that out to me, I realized that I do have a specific voice that I go into.
Ellie: 39:28
Which is not a bad thing. That's fine. We've got these personas.
David: 39:32
We are many. We are Legion.
Ellie: 39:35
Thanks Walt Whitman. Well, actually Nietzsche said it first. Enjoying this episode? Please rate and review Overthink on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. So far, we've been talking a lot about the problems with Zoom. So, for instance, it encourages bodily alienation and it flattens our modes of communication. But a lot of people have also been finding a silver lining here. What are some actual benefits of Zoom that we have discovered in the past nine months?
David: 40:21
Well, I think a lot of people are looking for this time when we leave Zoom behind and go back to in-person so-called normality. And here, I think we have to keep in mind the insides of critical disability theorists, who are letting us know that we have to think along the lines, for example, of abelist privilege, because one of the things that Zoom has done is that it has made work and social life much more accessible for people with disabilities. Back in August, Zoe Beery wrote a piece about this in the New York Times and her argument, which I find quite compelling, is that Zoom has made work suddenly accessible for people with disabilities who work in spaces that were not accessible or inclusive, or people with disabilities that required for whatever reason, more intensive forms of home care. And one of the things that's become clear is that the argument that employers and management used to make as to why they could not accommodate people with disabilities, namely that, "Oh, you can't do this kind of work from home," is actually just based on a refusal to try to work to include people with disabilities. So it's a problem of political will and nothing else. And in this piece, she introduces several people with disabilities and they talk not just about work but they also talk about social life. So a lot of people with disabilities report never being invited to social events, to the happy hours, to the game on Sunday, or to see little Susan's soccer game, whatever kinds of events, you know
Ellie: 42:01
Never want to go see little Susan's soccer game.
David: 42:03
I love soccer. I'm Mexican. I live and die for the World Cup every four years. Nothing else matters.
Ellie: 42:11
I'm the child of two theater freaks so it's me..
David: 42:15
Don't worry, I won't invite you to that just like, apparently I didn't invite you to all the happy hours I've been having.
Ellie: 42:22
And when you have your daughter, whose name will definitely be Susan, you won't invite me to her soccer games.
David: 42:26
It would be Susannah, if anything. Um, so back to this point about disability, which is very important to me, because I've written about disability theory, there is a way in which we include others in our social world by inviting them to do things outside of work. And one of the things that people with disabilities report, and report quite frequently, is that their able-bodied colleagues typically assume, without asking, that they can't do those things and therefore never invite them. And so one of the people that Zoe Beery interviews in this article in the New York Times says it feels like I'm at like sneaking behind the scenes and seeing all this background activity for the first time, because now that everything is online, there's no reason, other than just the most blatant forms of abelist oppression and discrimination, not to include somebody in a wheelchair to a happy hour event. And of course there was no reason before, either, but the point here is that it's shown the extent to which that exclusion is pervasive.
Ellie: 43:33
And is there a sense that once the pandemic is over, some of those events will continue online, thus enabling colleagues with disabilities to continue participating and/or that they will go back to being in person but colleagues will realize, "Hey, like now this colleague with a disability is very much part of the happy hour culture. Maybe it was messed up that I never invited them to begin with, because I didn't consult them about whether they were able to do that or whether we could do it in an accessible way for them," and then now they will continue? Or is there a sense that, "Nah, things just might go back to normal," and there may be an exclusion of folks with disabilities once more.
David: 44:07
I mean, I think we should all hope that things will change, but this is an open question for people with disabilities who are worried about whether the inclusion and the accommodation that Zoom has brought with it will, in fact, last or, again, whether we're going to go back to normal when normal was not accessible in the first place.
Ellie: 44:28
Uh huh. So this is a great example of one of the benefits of Zoom. It's that folks with disabilities are not only having greater access to social events, but that hopefully their able-bodied colleagues are starting to recognize that maybe they weren't paying enough attention to inclusion and maybe their colleague with a disability is actually able to participate in an accessible way, and they just hadn't adequately attended to that before.
David: 44:51
Yeah, and it's such a vicious circle, right? Because if you don't include people with disabilities, you don't learn about them. You don't develop a friendship with them. You don't hear about what their lives are like. And so you simply assume that their lives are much more limited than, in fact, they are. And as a result, you keep on not inviting them. And so you don't invite them until you know their lives, you can't know their lives until you invite them.
Ellie: 45:15
Yeah. Another thing that's come up is gender. For instance, a friend suggested that she's really grateful that a lot of meetings have gone online because she's now able to avoid creepy men, lecherous looks, maybe a passing comment here and there, because she's in the comfort of her home, visible from only the shoulder up.
David: 45:34
We know that women get judged for their looks and for their dress and for their hair a lot more than men are. And the distance that Zoom has introduced means that there is less of a focus on that. Because again, you don't have access to all of that information, right? You just see the mullet without the bottom.
Ellie: 45:54
You just see the professional on top, cozy pajamas on the bottom.
David: 45:57
I can see how Zoom would alleviate some of the pressure that a culture of patriarchy puts on women to always be available to men in a very particular way.
Ellie: 46:08
And also because there is less of a chance for the informal one-on-one conversations, which are often where sexual harassment occurs, that is less possible over Zoom.
David: 46:19
Yeah. So even the point that we made earlier about how it's taking away some of that body language, in the context of a gendered relationship that might be a silver lining because that's where sexual harassment often hides, right? It's not in saying things explicitly, which is precisely what allows the harasser to claim plausible deniability. If nothing was said, it's just passing through somebody a little close to their backside or letting the hand linger on the back a little bit too long. The sorts of things that men are very good at doing, and because we are bred to believe that women's bodies are there for our consumption.
Ellie: 47:00
Yes! One of my friends who works in a very male dominated industry, where she's often putting in really long hours in the office well after one might imagine, has talked about what a relief it is to be on Zoom and how much she dreads the possibility of ever going back to an office because of this.
David: 47:17
Well, in thinking about the benefits of Zoom, I recently had an interaction with a friend that made me think of another one. And this one is about pets. So my friend was talking about, you know, what we're all talking about ,like, when are we gonna go back to in-person teaching, working, et cetera. And that he said it to me, "You know who's Zoom's biggest proponent?" And I was like, "Oh no, who's that?" And he said, "Jack." Jack is his dog. Just to be clear about that.
Ellie: 47:46
Jack is a Zoom stan.
David: 47:48
Like he's a Zoom groupie, basically. He's just like living for Zoom.
Ellie: 47:53
David, the, the gen Z word for groupie is stan.
David: 47:56
Oh, that's how not in the know I am about things connected to groupies. I did go into, professional philosophy for the groupies, and it has not panned out. It turns out there's not a lot of groupies and fans for academic philosophers.
Ellie: 48:12
As somebody who has been on band tour buses, maybe I'm the groupie, who's also a philosopher.
David: 48:18
A philosopher with groupies, you need to have your groupies in order to reach that status. But so the point here is that I thought he was making a joke, and then he said, " No, it's because normally when I work, I have to leave him alone most of the day." So if you think about Jack's existence, it's just these long periods of loneliness that are then punctuated by my friend's return to the house. But now that my friend is working on Zoom, the depression that the dog clearly had has disappeared. He turned into a very happy dog, very active dog, very playful dog. And in fact, now my friend is worried about when he will have to go back to in-person work-- he's a lawyer-- because of the mental health of his animal companion whom he worries will experience that return as an abandonment.
Ellie: 49:14
Oh, so Zoom is great for dogs or rather working from home is great for dogs.
David: 49:18
Yeah for animals. And so there- there's this dimension to Zoom that has nothing to do with its users, but with some of the inhabitants of the home. And as you know, I work a lot on animals, on animal emotions, animal cognition, animal behavior, and so now I'm wondering whether a lot of pets will develop abandonment issues where, for reasons unknown to them, their human companions suddenly are no longer there from one day to the next.
Ellie: 49:49
And also human babies and toddlers, the same could be said for them as well. I mean, I'm thinking too, even about for the actual Zoom users who have pets, it's been a real way for people to connect during the pandemic. So I was actually shouted out in a recent faculty meeting by a student representative for creating an online class culture that included people sending Slack photos of their pets and that sort of thing, or we'd show pet sometimes on Zoom. And I think that's a pretty common way of connecting is that professors will show their own pets on Zoom or we'll invite students to do the same. watched one student in my class' kittens grow over the course of the semester. I know, I know. So I think one thing that's happened for me this semester is that I have really let my walls down vis-a-vis my students. I'm usually extremely professional. I have a reputation for being pretty strict, um, and I think that's partly a compensatory strategy for the fact that I'm a young, feminine-presenting woman in the classroom. But I think that one thing that's been nice over Zoom has been this opportunity to just start our share pieces of our personal life, . And that's wonderful.
David: 50:59
The more general point to take away from this, maybe is that it has led to a humanization of what is otherwise a relatively regimented, formalized dynamic. And so I've had a similar experience, where for the first time, I've related to students in a much more candid way, in a much more, um, vulnerable way, in fact, because like I said, there are a lot of things that I can not control, and at some point you just have to accept the fact that we're all in this together, that we're on this ship moving forward. And none of us is in control of it. And because they have access to you in a new way. You know, like the students are Sartrean Peeping Toms looking-
Ellie: 51:44
I know right.
David: 51:45
and like checking you out inside. And you're like, ah!
Ellie: 51:50
Well, so there are some good things to Zoom, it sounds like. Maybe we want to carry into the future this new vulnerability, find ways to incorporate pets into work life, continue to have some meetings online to minimize potential for sexual harassment, and to create further accessibility. What else?
David: 52:08
One thing that I hope doesn't happen is that we don't let the fact that those of us who were thrown into Zoom against our will because of the pandemic simply turn a page on the last year and fail to take home some of the lessons that maybe we should be taking from this one year experiment, and that we really take a moment to reflect on what are the things from the last year that we want to keep? are the things that we need to keep what? Are the things that we need to, and want to, move away from?
Ellie: 52:43
Yes. And on moving away from, let me say unequivocally, you should turn your self-view on Zoom off whenever possible! We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
David: 52:58
You can email us with questions, feedback, or even requests for life advice at DearOverthink@gmail.com.
Ellie: 53:06
You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter at @overthink_pod. We want to thank Anna Koppelman, our production assistant, Samuel P.K. Smith for the original music, and Trevor Ames for our logo.
David: 53:20
Thanks so much for joining us today!