Remember a hundred thousand years ago, when that guy did a Skype interview on BBC and his kids stormed in partway through? It wasn’t just a funny video or even a much-reproduced meme; it became actual news. “For two weeks we were the most famous family on earth,” professor Robert Kelly told the Guardian in 2017.
Before he went viral, Kelly thought the invasion of his children, while adorable, had ended his career as a talking head. (He let the BBC post the clip online partly because he felt he’d let them down.) His children’s incursion into the highly controlled world of produced television was not just awkward, but taboo: The personal ought not mix with the professional.
But now that the coronavirus pandemic has shuttered much of the world, we are all Kelly or his wife, Jung-a Kim—negotiating a live camera streaming our often messy, sometimes chaotic, and certainly not-for-public-consumption living areas to our clients, bosses, or employees. That’s if you’re lucky. For many COVID-19 patients isolated in wards to prevent infection, their only window to the world is a screen, as author Summer Brennan, who was hospitalized in Paris in March, recently wrote: “This was an absolutely terrifying illness that I had to get through alone except for masked doctors and nurses, and people's comedy videos actually helped tremendously.”
Consequently, connecting through screens matters more than ever. Broadcast ratings are up—news programming ratings are up. Tiger King, by virtue of being the craze of the week during quarantine, became diversionary fodder during a White House press conference. Those are televised events too, of course; the president has boasted about their ratings. Meanwhile, Governor Andrew Cuomo has established himself as the voice of the rational response to the coronavirus crisis largely due to his calming daily briefings, which folksily come with anecdotes and a PowerPoint. The idea of getting a monthly subscription to access 10,000-15,000 hours of content doesn’t sound like a ridiculous proposition right now—it sounds like a lifeline.
Now, more than ever, we can also make our own channels, thanks to smart phones and TikTok and Instagram and Snapchat, FaceTime and Skype and Google Hangouts, and Zoom. (My dad calls all video conferencing tech “webinar.”) Many of us have been curating our lives for online content for years now, but now these channels are everything; our lives are now largely online content. These platforms are providing us with audiovisual transmissions from the people we can’t see in person: not just friends and influencers on social media, but health care providers who have switched to telehealth, teachers who have pivoted to online learning, coworkers who have become telecommuters. We stream yoga classes and psychotherapy and tarot readings, happy hours and dance parties. Saturday Night Live did an entire episode via Zoom, stitched together via the cast’s webcams and phones.
The ease and availability of videoconferencing is a gift, but it presents challenges previously reserved for the Kardashian clan and the extremely online. Giving others a window into your world is intoxicating—and exposing. You can see them, but unless you opt out, they can also see you. SNL provided voyeuristic pleasure—Tom Hanks’ kitchen and Aidy Bryant’s houseplants; the view from Kyle Mooney’s window. These oddly intimate details are what we’re sharing with others now.
Getting ready for a meeting doesn’t require going outside anymore, but it does create anxiety about being camera-ready—costume, hair, sound, camera angle. (You never quite appreciate lighting designers until the moment you’re trying to light yourself appropriately for an important video call.) PopSugar put together a list of the best accessories to wear in front of your webcam: hoops, scrunchies, necklaces, barrettes. Elle made this guide to your best Zoom hair. Dozens of websites have popped up offering Zoom backgrounds—to, essentially, green-screen whatever you want behind your head, if your walls aren’t quite up to the standards of Architectural Digest.
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April 14, 2020 at 02:22AM
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The Pandemic Has Turned Us All Into TV - Vanity Fair
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