“My Life,on Zoom TV”

Zoom TV as Consumption and Labor

Zoom is a video conferencing platform that was founded in 2011 by former Cisco executive Eric Yuan (Lorenz et al. 2020). Prior to the pandemic, most users were more familiar with other platforms like Skype and applications like FaceTime and Facebook Messenger. Although Zoom was somewhat integrated into businesses and universities who used the application for their remote work, once lockdown began and a majority of educational and administrative labor shifted to remote settings, Zoom exploded. During the very first weeks of the pandemic, Zoom grew from 56,000 user downloads per day in late January 2020 to about 2.13 million downloads per day on March 23, when lockdown measures were announced in the United Kingdom, approximately a week after U.S. states began shutdowns (Neate 2020). On that same day Zoom began offering the platform free of cost to primary and secondary education institutions all over the world as well as offering up to 40 minutes free Zoom calls to anyone with a free registered account. Although not all workplaces used Zoom-branded applications, video conference technologies became referred to as Zoom even as other platforms like Facetime, Skype, WebEx, and Jitsi offered people a way to interact and entertain during the lockdowns.

While Zoom is the focus of this essay, Zoom was not the only newish media to capitalize on the collective isolation of lockdown. The social media app TikTok also quickly gained momentum in the early lockdown by facilitating fairly simple and fast video collaboration and conversation between people who may or may not know each other. Though TikTok was not necessarily a part of an academic’s labor, students and people of all ages all over the world began entertaining each other through their screens in “duets” where they expanded another users video, and through “challenges” where they attempted to recreate other videos through dances, lip syncing, and various feats of video editing. And Zoom appeared even on TikTok as so many students used the app to film and share challenge pranks on their teachers and professors, while others used the app to highlight the challenges of teaching, working, and living on Zoom.

In a matter of weeks “Zoom” transformed a collective sense of televisuality quickly bridging the gap between social media content production, reality television, and academic labor, especially for media studies scholars. Like the sharp cut edits of the viral TikTok “flip the switch” challenge videos, in which two people stood in front of their bathroom mirror dancing to the song “Nonstop” by Drake and flipping their bathroom light switch off and on to a particular beat that facilitated an edit that had them return having switched outfits (Barrientos 2020), the pace of this change felt jarringly hyperreal and completely incongruous to the suspended animation of the lockdown. To quote Carrie Bradshaw: and just like that, we were all on Zoom TV.

Those of us who could work from home suddenly scrambled to find a space for a home studio. People became amateur lighting designers, boom operators, scenics, and set designers. We learned technical setups for best angles, make-up, hair and costuming tricks, and ordered green screens for more privacy. I acquired new glasses to block my computer’s blue light and a new double ring light to avoid my computer’s glare. I set up furniture to enhance my background, making it look less like a bedroom and more like a home-office. Every morning I styled myself from the waist up in preparation for my Zoom appearance. I taught classes and went to faculty meetings by Zoom. And five days a week, I met with my writing group ostensibly to write but also gossip about the latest shenanigans on reality TV and within academia.

These individual rituals were mirrored by the new aesthetic strategies of the larger media industries. The television news media also leaned in with hosts and guests alike appearing in Zoom boxes on screen from their homes. Although the cable news shows had been using videoconferencing for some time to facilitate remote interviews and “live reporting,” the start of lockdown called on video-conferencing applications to carry the full weight of the daily broadcasts. New production difficulties emerged that limited where and how many people could work together in the actual studio. Studios were stripped down to bare essential personnel; many productions halted. And as the pandemic continued, quarantines and social distancing rules were put in place by the entertainment unions and other governing bodies on sets to ensure the safety of the crew and talent. These rules included limiting studio and set capacities, masking requirements, random and regular testing and temperature checks (McNary 2020). Zoom and video conferencing technologies provided a means to maintain the aesthetics of liveness of live news broadcasts even through these mandated distances.

While office workers went home and made bedrooms into mini studios, the entertainment industry was developing new practices as well. Zoom home background aesthetics were taken up within television shows and news broadcasts, and planned major film releases were halted or went straight to streaming video on demand (SVOD). The difference between these two groups was primarily one of scale, in which home workers invested in home studio equipment that took their on-screen aesthetics from functional to amateur professional in terms of lighting and background, while Hollywood on-air professionals went from the sleek shadowless appearances afforded by a crew of hair, make-up, and lighting professionals to more basic hair and make-up styles that were less than on camera perfection. As one viral TikTok video noted, “the makeup artists ha[d] left the building.” Because of course even in the event, or especially in the event, of a global life-threatening pandemic, the show must go on. . .live.

This effort to reinvigorate the promises of television’s liveness became amplified by the Black Lives Matter uprisings a few months later, in the summer of 2020. During this time the news magazines doubled down on (or, more appropriately, zoomed in on) the aesthetics of liveness. Nightly, Black academics, activists, social media personalities, and political pundits emerged in little boxes to cover and discuss everything from massive nationwide protests to daily incidents of racial and police violence caught on video. These new experts presented particular kinds of Black aesthetics as a way to speak to Black audiences through their backgrounds and appearances. Books about Black life and racial injustice (especially if the expert was also the book’s author) were often prominently displayed in their backgrounds. Art and pictures of Black social and political leaders like John Lewis and Martin Luther King Jr. were framed and placed strategically on bookshelves. Musical references were made and side jokes about Blackness were made between Black-identified on-air experts. All of this gave an aesthetics background that affectively supported their claims to expertise in Blackness and Black political and social life.

Zoom TV as Defining Aesthetics Trends

While this formation of Zoom TV was fairly new, its aesthetics harkened back to earlier television sequences and sets. Zoom in its appearance was not unfamiliar, it looked like things many had already seen on TV in shows like Hollywood Squares (NBC/syndicated, 1966–2004) or The Brady Bunch (ABC, 1969–1974). When one logs on to Zoom, for example, you are presented with a screen text box that prompts you to share your computer sound. Behind that interface is you, staring back at yourself looking at how you and your background appear in that small video frame. As you stare at yourself, you are given two choices to click on: start with video, or start without video. Upon this selection the main panel opens up to a grid of stacked image tiles, with each tile framing a person and their selected background. In general, most people are framed in close-up or medium close-up range, although that depends on how many people are using that particular device for the call. On more than one occasion I saw people who positioned their devices farther back, enabling a wide shot of them on their couch or of them laying back in their chair. Others would position their camera lower or higher. The organization of the tiles remains a mystery, and in the early iterations users did not have control over the organization (although later users have a bit more control over their own screen grid). The mystery meant that no single individual’s screen organization looked the same, although there was one constant: the user’s tile from their own view was always second from left.

One significant consequence of this interface was that nobody exactly knew where to look when they were speaking or listening. In the signature opening credits of The Brady Bunch, the blended Brady family are introduced one at a time in framed boxes, until the screen starts to resemble a tic-tac-toe box with each character trying to make eye contact with each other. Through the opening theme song each of the Brady’s eyes shifted on beat to look at another character. In a period of social upheaval where the traditional nuclear family was said to be in decline (leading to more “blended” families forged from divorce) these shifting gazes seemed to be an effort to reassert the primacy of the family through meaningful eye contact through their individual framed boxes (Marinucci 2005). Likewise, the people on Zoom TV were often looking this way and that, trying to make sense of this blended form of active social connection and consumed entertainment. The similarities to these programs’ aesthetics are significant to understanding the appeal of Zoom TV. Zoom represented not just your connection to others but also your entertainment, and many people participated in this production from home, sharing quips back and forth as if they were vying for camera time on the set of another familiar TV show filled with boxed characters in the screen: the Hollywood Squares.

In response to the appearance of experts in our living rooms from theirs (or in our bedrooms from their closets, or in our kitchens from their basements, and so on), many social media accounts surfaced that would rate and make suggestions to guests and hosts about their background, providing a satirical feedback system for Zoom TV. One popular X account (formerly known as Twitter), Room Rater (@ratemyskyperoom), started shortly after the beginning of lockdown by a couple, Claude Taylor and Jessie Bahrey, who were trying to entertain themselves while being separated by an international border (Ferrier 2021). Their account gave set design advice regarding the Zoom backgrounds of people featured on TV, ultimately assigning a “room rating” on a scale of 0–10. Many celebrities, news pundits, and politicians (including Hillary Clinton) sought out their ratings which judged everything from lighting and depth of field to angles and background clutter, mixing political affect with home aesthetics.

Zoom TV as Industry Practice

In some ways applications like Zoom and Skype were already familiar in the reality television production world. Video-conferencing has been commonly used in reality television as a low-cost way to produce pitches and their accompanying short video trailers called “sizzle reels” that showcase a potential producer’s access to casting and location connections. The stacked tiles that became a definitive aesthetics of Zoom TV’s video-conferencing capabilities also made their way into reality TV programs. This visual effect was achieved in many different ways and not just through Zoom. Video editing techniques produced the video-conferencing boxes that enabled certain television series associated with liveness such as reality competition shows, The Voice, and American Idol, and the reunion episodes of the Real Housewives franchise to finish out their interrupted seasons and continue with production of the subsequent season while still reinforcing aesthetics associated with TV liveness. Notable were the “live” competitions and finales of The Voice and American Idol that were held through at-home recordings presented “as live” Zoom-like videoconferencing squares in the summer of 2020.

After production was halted for quarantine, both American Idol and The Voice sent contestants home studio kits and guidance on how to set them up. The contestants then filmed themselves for the remaining live competition rounds (Poniewozik 2020). In these “live from home” rounds socioeconomic class differences were made evident showing contestants lack of or access to space and assistance. For instance, in the Top 17 performances of the eighteenth season of The Voice the eventual winner, Todd Tilghman, performed from what looked like a recording studio in his home, while eventual runner-up Toneisha Harris performed in what appeared to be a much smaller space in front of a simple curtain backdrop (The Voice 2020). Although it is difficult to know to what extent these backgrounds affected the results of the contest, they may have played a part in audience voting practices, serving as an aesthetics proxy for socioeconomic class. Numerous casting calls went out for “virtual live audiences” on many talk shows, game shows, and reality competitions. The “live audience” of the next season of The Voice (which aired in October 2020) following lockdown consisted of multiple screens arranged where the audience formerly sat behind the judges (Gonzalez 2020).

Live commentary from audience members is another recurrent feature or form of reality television. For instance, although the series Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K; various, 1988–1999) does not easily fit into the category of reality television per se, the type of “live” commentary around which the premise of the series revolves was easily assimilated into the reality genre and its pandemic programing. MST3K featured three characters (a janitor and two robots) who are ostensibly trapped on a spacecraft that is orbiting Earth; each episode found the three characters watching and commenting on a feature length B-Movie. Another antecedent would be VH1’s long running series Pop-Up Video (1996–2002), which featured running commentary on music videos through dialog boxes that would “pop-up” on screen. Series like Gogglebox (Channel 4, 2013–present) and The People’s Couch (Bravo, 2013–2016)—essentially the British and American versions of the same program—feature several different families on their couches at home watching and reacting to a reality television show that the television audience watches alongside with them. This type of video has also been a popular format on social media sites and has evolved into the contemporary “reaction video.”

On HGTV, videoconferencing was used to produce a comedic variation of the reaction video for the network’s flagship program House Hunters (1999–present), blending social media and television through incorporating the aesthetics of Zoom TV. ² House Hunters: Comedians on Couches (2020–2021) featured six comedians who rewatched old episodes of House Hunters together in eight episodes over two seasons. The episodes were shot through video-conferencing set-ups that paired two comedians who filmed themselves at home with the episode airing over the video-conferencing platform’s screen share (Lynn 2021). The series revealed its production through certain B-roll shots that showed how the comedians were filming themselves, exposing several camera set-ups including ones artfully placed on stacks of books, tripods, and bookshelves, presumably to offer a variety of angles for post-production. Including the production within the frame allows for the series to showcase and highlight the quarantine aesthetics of the show as being a one-person operation. Yet on screen this set up mimicked reality television and social media reaction videos as well as the Zoom interface. On House Hunters: Comedians on Couches the comedians watched episodes together while trying to make quips that made light of various aspects of the production, dialog, and performances of the House Hunters characters. The comedians were shown watching together through multiple tiles on screen with a sort of picture-in-picture set up. Using the familiar House Hunters logo colors for titles and a backdrop in line with HGTV branding, the three comedians were grouped at the bottom of the screen on top of a larger frame in which the episode played.

These more obvious attempts at approximating liveness grew alongside the entertainment industry’s embrace of the awkward staginess of this somewhat new form of television and video entertainment. These approaches found their way not only in the live-aesthetics shows like the news and reality TV, but also appeared in sitcoms, musicals, concerts, and other formats that attempted to lay claim to liveness as a way not just to entertain but also to fundraise. Zoom TV gave quarantined audiences live table readings from new and revived popular sitcoms and musicals in one notable series titled Zoom Where It Happens. All of these episodes were promoted as “live” fundraisers, “live” concerts, and “live” webinars that would stream into homes at a specified time, just like the broadcasts of “live” network TV. Included in this curated series of Zoom programing were revivals of popular sitcoms like The Golden Girls (NBC, 1985–1992) and Friends with all-Black casts, as well as reunions of the sitcoms Frasier and Community. These table readings were hosted in partnership with Zoom and various other organizations that focused on the social justice issues that had entered the spotlight with the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent Black Lives Matter uprisings.

The first episode of Zoom Where It Happens was “The Golden Girls: Reimagined,” which aired on September 8, 2020 and starred notable Black actors such as Alfre Woodard, Tracee Ellis Ross, Sanaa Lathan, and Regina King. These well-known Hollywood actresses read from the first season episode of the original series “Flu Attack” (which originally aired in 1986) as the beloved main characters Sophia, Rose, Blanche, and Dorothy, respectively. The Zoom series partnered with the racial justice organization Color of Change as a webinar for audiences, even though it was formatted like an episode of broadcast television. The episode also included appearances by Lena Waithe and Jesse Williams, who read the ancillary characters within the episode, with Waithe hosting the episode. The episode was produced by Ava DuVernay and directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood and featured public service messaging about the importance of the 2020 census while also raising money for Color of Change.

“The Golden Girls: Reimagined” illustrates how Zoom TV highlighted the bridge it had built between television and social media. At the end of the table read, a new Zoom box appeared at the bottom of the screen featuring YouTuber and social media personality Aaron Scott, who reprised his viral gospel cover of the iconic theme song from the original series “Thank You For Being a Friend.” Scott shared the screen with these A-List Hollywood stars for only a brief moment and when his song was over his Zoom box quickly blipped out, giving a visual rendering to the fast burn of viral fame. Moreover, because these episodes were formatted through Zoom as a webinar that aired only once, although thousands of people registered and watched, the audience was unable to see each other there. These Zoom TV events promoted this “liveness” as a way to gain more viewers, perhaps through the manufactured affect of “FOMO” (Fear of Missing Out) that accompanied the older appointment viewing model of broadcast television, rather than the SVOD or DVR viewing practices that so many viewers had grown accustomed to at the time. Yet these webinar aesthetics had moved away from the participatory model that Zoom TV relied on for its growth.

All over, people hosted their own personal social events through Zoom which made everyone on the call into TV, to be consumed by friends and family. Alongside all of the ways people learned studio set-ups and new ways of socializing, Zoom TV emerged. There were birthday parties hosted as game shows and talk shows, and people held readings, karaoke parties, and private concerts that entertained each other in and through the isolation. I found myself at a variety of these types of gatherings, from personal parties and get-togethers to professional meetings and events, watching my little Zoom square to make sure I was well balanced in my little box and that nothing too personal found itself in the frame. Like many other folks, I was often unsure where to direct my gaze, wanting to both appear engaged and, well, look good. In the classroom, I needed to learn even more television production tips as I tried to engage students through Zoom, which more often than not meant staring at myself lecturing to a screen filled with the black squares of students with their cameras off. Again, my gaze drifted around the screen as I tried to connect with the black tiles that represented the students.

Zoom TV as Educational Practice

While activists, organizers, and academics used Zoom to produce widely accessible teach-ins and lectures meant to address systemic issues around race and class, Zoom TV in university life also exposed forms of inequality that were often hidden from our traditional classroom experiences. On Zoom we educators got intimate glimpses inside the domestic and private lives of the students in our classes. Their backgrounds revealed more than the gendered labor of home spaces, these little boxes brought into sharp focus the disproportionate care responsibilities of women and people of color. It became clear who had access to private and quiet spaces and who managed these spaces. The backgrounds being rated on social media on the nightly news programs contrasted sharply to the glimpses of my students’ quarantine lives. The pristine bookshelves decorated with pineapples and dense academic books on the evening news shows being rated for balance and composition of frame bore little resemblance to the backgrounds of my students. Instead, the backgrounds of my students sometimes revealed an inability to find privacy in quarantine, or even to fully quarantine at all. There were rooms shared with younger siblings that they also provided care for, and classes being attended while on duty as “essential workers” who delivered food to someone else’s quarantine. This daily contrast gave a stark representation to ideas about the use value of knowledge production and education—and how Zoom TV interfered and interfaced with each.

The class divides at the heart of education were also made evident by the fact that some students would rarely appear on Zoom, unable to work from home, and students without private financial resources lacked access to quality internet services or private spaces and thus had trouble keeping up with their classes. In individual meetings, rather than appearing in Zoom TV frames with @ratemyskyperoom approved balanced aesthetics of the nightly news, or even virtual backgrounds taken from stock photography, students would show up on screen from their phones in their cars, from their work break-rooms, or sometimes not at all.

In the United States, teaching on Zoom about race and popular culture was charged with the political and social events concurrently happening: Black Lives Matter uprisings, the 2020 presidential election, and an endless circulation of videos of racialized police violence. Teaching about race has always been fraught and under attack, from challenges to who gets to be in the classroom to more recent conservative state legislatures willful misrecognition of “critical race theory,” but Zoom gave yet another avenue for public support of racial animosity and violence. We as intellectual communities risked being victims to racist “Zoom bombings,” in which lectures, discussions, and events would be disrupted by guests who would initiate racist visual and verbal attacks through shared screen and audio. Some faculty addressed this by recording lectures for asynchronous teaching. The move to asynchronous interaction was a move away from the claims to liveness that contributed to the emergence of what I have been calling Zoom TV.

And still Zoom was promoted everywhere as a new connection. It became the way to hold meetings, socialize and entertain. As Zoom looked more and more like the object of my research, I retreated into watching more and more banal and predictable procedurals or fantasy series for escape. And as more and more Zoom events cropped up, the pressure of being the content I consumed overwhelmed my ability to focus on any reality-based content and I, like many others, turned to more traditional forms of television (like the popular sitcom, or the procedural drama). But in my Zoom life I still caught glimpses in people’s homes that deeply resonated with my understanding of reality television as both constructed and participatory.

Conclusion

Zoom is not the first place where ideas about participation in the media have risen. Debates in the field about participatory media have emerged around the work of video activists of the 1970s and 1980s, as well as through other more publicly accessible new video technologies such as public access television, social media, and reality TV (Ouellette 2002). Whether or not the ideals of access to the means of production and broadcast have been or can be met through this proliferation of technology is an important question to consider. And while each of these new video technologies seems to offer more and more access to amateur producers and video-makers the new video technologies are always already deeply embedded in capitalist marketplaces. While this Zoom TV expansion may not fulfill these participatory ideals, what can be gleaned from this corporate backdrop that nevertheless allows entry to see things that have not totally been visible on TV or within everyday media landscapes?

Zoom TV forced us to produce small screen representations of ourselves doing our work and living our lives for the entertainment of our co-workers, bosses, students, friends, and families. This expansion of hyperlocalized content production aesthetics has reverberated to most registers of daily life, such as how one presents and produces themselves in their Zoom box in everything from personal styling choices to the need for bathroom breaks. This, in turn, reflects and, sometimes, exposes the racialized, gendered, and classed features of both television and everyday life, especially when they are one and the same. Zoom can have real effects on the interplay of office politics and professionalism, on promotion and advancement, or, for some, even termination.

But like on reality television, through Zoom TV there also appeared a proliferation of racial representation, often in new and innovative ways. Even if some of those representations and innovations are ultimately co-opted at the service of corporate profits, the access and use was breathtaking, even as classes have (mostly) returned to physical spaces. The energy, willingness, and ability to “show up” to Zoom events, dates, and get togethers has had lasting effects on public and private relationships. Zoom TV, I might say, brought the screens together and brought so many of us into our own screens.