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Zoom takes away a piece of our souls Video conferencing is a wonderful lifeline. But it's also subtly dehumanising


May 7, 2020   5 mins

Native Americans and Aboriginal Australians are sometimes associated with the view that cameras can steal the soul. It is the sort of view that we in the supposedly more advanced and enlightened West scoff at, thinking it a primitive superstition. But it’s not. Cameras really can steal the soul.

My evidence is anecdotal. But among the friends that I speak to during this bleak time, one subject keeps on coming up, again and again: the soul-sucking nature of video conferencing. As many as 300 million users worldwide now communicate with each other using Zoom, and other video platforms are catching up fast. We use it not just for meetings, but for everything from socially distanced dinner parties to church services. It’s is the software through which we make business deals, go to school, say goodbye to our dying loved ones, and even — believe it or not — attend sex parties. Zoom is now the gatekeeper, the space between our separate, isolated lives.

Now Zoom is having its problems with security. Is it vulnerable to foreign surveillance? Will uninvited participants come in and disrupt our meetings? My interest is not in such matters. I worry about its existential consequences. That this all-pervasive digital mediation is means of communication in which we lose something essential about ourselves.

In 1929, the Jewish Marxist philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote a seminal essay reflecting on the advent of mass culture. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, he argues that the technological changes of modernity, and in particular the capacity to reproduce images, has a profound and transformative effect on how we understand art. For with mass reproducibility we begin to lose the idea that there is something special about the original work of art — its uniqueness, its “aura”. The original painting of the Mona Lisa hanging in the Louvre has a quality about it that its many representations, on posters and postcards, just do not have. Benjamin thinks that this special and unique quality the original artwork has is linked to the original use of art in cultic and religious festivals. One could even say that Benjamin was arguing that the camera steals the painting’s soul.

Benjamin’s essay was the reflection of a Marxist worried about the dehumanising effects of modernity and mass culture. I wonder what he would have made of Zoom? It is not too much of a stretch to extend the argument he used more than 90 years ago to our present concerns — not just the work of art, but also the human subject in the age of digital representation. For it is Benjamin’s essay that best captures for me the thing that Zoom takes away — our “aura”, our souls.

I think a word or two about the idea of the soul is necessary here. I do not mean it in the sense that it developed in the early Christian era, when some aspect of our personal identity was required to carry the essence of who we are into the heavenly kingdom, beyond death. I simply mean by the soul the thing that makes me… me. My essence, my individuality, the specific characteristic that picks me out as different in the world.

Philosophers have argued about what this ‘thing’ could possibly be ever since at least the fifth century BC when the comic playwright Epicharmus described how a debtor tried to wriggle out of his obligation to repay a loan by arguing that because so much of him had changed since he took it out, he was not the same person and so could not be reasonably expected to repay something that was effectively taken out by someone else.

So too with justice. If there is no thing that makes me me, how can I be punished for a murder I committed 20 years ago when I was, so to speak, a totally different person? The soul may be a fiction, but it is a fiction that underpins some of the very basic features of our common life. These days philosophers are much more likely to speak of our physical continuity in space and time as the carriers of our identity. Our bodies have become our souls, so to speak.

I don’t want to go too far down the rabbit hole of the philosophy of personal identity. But I do just want to disabuse those who presume that the very use of the word soul commits someone to a Christian-type world view. I use it as a useful shorthand for what makes me me and you you. Our distinctiveness.

With many of the people I meet over video conferencing, especially in a business context, I don’t care too much about their fundamental distinctiveness. Our relationship is transactional and instrumental. We want to get some sort of deal done. I don’t need to know how they smell or the funny, distinctive way that they stir your coffee. I have no need of their “aura”. But if I am trying to communicate, say, with my wife after a period of absence, Zoom is incredibly frustrating. I want to touch, to hold, to inhabit the same space. I want the original, not the digital copy. And indeed, if Benjamin is correct, even if the technology gets so advanced that we will be able to experience the touch of another at a distance and mediated through technology, that still wouldn’t be enough.

Zoom does many weird things. The other day I sat in a meeting with people sitting in the US and Jerusalem. The space we commonly inhabited, the Zoom space, was not a physical space. It was a space that is not a space. There is both a curious intimacy to the face-to-face encounter, but also a sense that something is not quite right.

Zoom enables a rather bloodless kind of meeting. Not only do we carefully curate ourselves to the other — now even concerned about the books we have on the shelf behind us — but the whole experience seems stage managed in such a way as to make impossible many of the traditional ways that we use to get to know each other. For example, getting to know someone partly involves my presence disrupting the careful self-presentation of the other, and their presence disrupting mine. Never before have I appreciated quite how essential the interruption is to mutual acquaintance. On video calls all this is flattened out.

With Zoom you can travel the world and meet important people, not only without leaving your study but without even having to put on your trousers. In other words the social obligations of sharing a common physical space no longer apply. And, to me, that makes for something profoundly disquieting. Different rules apply to the public and the private realms. Zoom collapses them, plays with them. And I worry that no good can come of this.

There is something religious about this sense of disquiet, as there was to Benjamin’s idea that mechanical reproduction dissipates the aura. Over the lockdown period I have been celebrating the Eucharist for my congregation in front of a Zoom camera. In such a context only I am able to receive the bread and the wine that has been transformed into the body and blood of Christ — and this is a real privation for many of my congregants. How about if we get some bread and wine and place it near the screen, some have asked: can you consecrate it over Zoom? And the answer of the church is clearly no — it doesn’t work like that. And this is not because “the magic” doesn’t carry over Zoom. Consecration is all about real presence. It requires the physical connection of shared space. Incarnation, so to speak. Indeed, Zoom is the magic that is being distrusted here.

Video conferencing is an extremely useful tool of human communication. And it has become a lifeline to many in these times of isolation. But it is precisely because it is so important that we must also worry about it, for we can all too easily allow our agendas in life to be set by the limitations of our tools. As Abraham Maslow famously said in 1966: “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” And the tool du jour is Zoom.

It is not easy to express my anxiety about this new tool, and what it is doing to us. But I feel there is something subtly dehumanising about it. Perhaps that’s why Zoom is so draining, why it makes us so tired using it. It’s like a voodoo doll. We pay the price for our global connections with something that is slowly sucking away at our souls.


Giles Fraser is a journalist, broadcaster and Vicar of St Anne’s, Kew.

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Anita Coltman
Anita Coltman
4 years ago

I have a very different attitude to video conferencing. My current experience involves communicating with my daughter, son in law & most importantly my 6 month old grandchild who live on the other side of the world. Certainly the contact is hugely inferior to the actual contact we had a few months ago & I ache to hold them. I sometimes find myself reaching out to the screen as if to touch their faces. But surely this contact is an order of magnitude better than a phone call, which itself would be another order of magnitude better than letters.
Perhaps without the previous relationships already established, the effects you describe might be an issue. I remember when I was working, it always was a great boost to meet colleagues with whom I had previously had only phone, email or letter communication.
There is something about being physically together that enhances relationships (which is your point) but for me, this video contact is way better than the other options currently available.

Ian Anderson
Ian Anderson
4 years ago
Reply to  Anita Coltman

I understand what you’re getting at, but would perhaps quibble on the letters front ““ one cannot keep Zoom calls or phone calls, but one can fondly re-read letters many years from now. In fact, as someone born in 1974, I often lament the fact that my cache of letters more or less dries up circa 1998-ish.

Jeremy Stone
Jeremy Stone
4 years ago

I tried to respond to this thoughtful piece yesterday, but my words seem to have vanished into the ether. I very much doubt if Walter Benjamin would have liked Zoom. But suspect that his reason would not have been dilution of the aura. There is a kind of problem in the philosophy of mind that video conferencing forces upon us, by placing us on that screen along with the other participants. When we address them, we see this homuncular version of ourselves, somehow escaped from the interior and playing a part on the video stage. Who is this person? Our interiority has been violated, and with it our personality. We are obliged to respond to our own changes of facial expression, in an implicitly infinite corridor of mirrors. No wonder it is exhausting. By an historical fluke, none of this applies to the telephone, where (unless there is bad feedback on the line) the voice we hear is what we are used to hearing in everyday life. No problems with the soul there.

ripsawridge
ripsawridge
4 years ago

The greatest struggle of my life to date has been the struggle to come awake to each day, to each person before me, and to really be there and breathe in and with that moment.

Technology is abstraction, which provides power at the expense of depth. It is distraction, which fills your consciousness with the exotic and the far away, leaving you too drained to clearly see the close, humble and mundane.

I am a programmer. I build these systems and I began as their biggest fan — you mean I can be well paid for working on these cool machines and not talking to people? Sign me up! I wish I could go back to that young fella and take him on a walk. I would encourage him to take a hammer to that wall he was beginning to build against first the dangerous feelings of others, and then finally his own.

Now, we all pour our energies into screens. I would ask a challenging question: if you wonder what we are fussing about, with our talk of auras, of souls, of shared spaces with some kind of magic in them… If you don’t see the difference between your co-worker beside you and his 320×200 pixel representation on a screen, maybe you, like me, have only barely felt the Real World.

Andrew Lale
Andrew Lale
4 years ago
Reply to  ripsawridge

Excellent comment. Very nicely said. I’ve trodden the same road, and I now wake up every day and commit myself to being HERE, and focusing my energy on my life and surroundings, and not out THERE. It makes a huge difference.

ajstidwill
ajstidwill
4 years ago

Maybe this is simplistic, but could it be the fact that you can be instantly “switched off” at any moment if you do or say something the other people taking part in the video conference don’t like that makes it rather sinister? In a real life flesh-and-blood encounter neither you nor the people you’re talking to can be just disappeared in this way. (You can walk out of the room of course, but that isn’t quite the same thing).

Andrew Lale
Andrew Lale
4 years ago

There is something forever 1974 about Giles Fraser. He is like one of those unfortunate little bugs that get stuck in some tree resin and for the next three thousand years remain in exactly the same position and attitude. That’s not all bad, you understand, but it has the staleness of something which just doesn’t change. The world of the Giles Fraser is gone, the world of the trendy vicar with his staunch commitment to Marx and distinct lack of interest in Jesus, and his belief that only through the destruction of our society, traditions and mores can we ever reach our earthly paradise. I thank God every day that the Giles Fraser world is now as dead as a dodo.

Hosias Kermode
Hosias Kermode
4 years ago

Not sure about this. I’m finding I am seeing more of family with FaceTime than I ever was when I could jump on a train for a half hour journey. And the medium is forcing us to be creative about how we interact. I played Top Trumps with my 5 year old grandson last night, with his father holding my hand of cards, but me making the calls. Grandson loved it. So did I. We’ll finish the game tonight. I make terrible cakes, which I show him, so he can have a good laugh at crazy granny. Then I post him the recipe and cookie cutters so he can have a go at baking himself and eventually show me. I think love overcomes technology. The soul is stronger. Maybe the church needs to rethink distant eucharists on that same basis.

Michael in Chicago
Michael in Chicago
4 years ago

I’ve been using online meeting technology for years for business as well as for education and socializing. It’s a godsend. Of course, one should have people contact in their lives, but Zoom expands one’s horizons immeasurably. The pandemic takes away a piece of our soul, not Zoom.

Arnold Fishman
Arnold Fishman
4 years ago

Zoom is a problem but not for the reason you elaborate on. I would contend that the technology does help and provides comfort”but with every tool there are downsides and Zoom is worrisome because it is potentially connected to China and their survelillance.

Regarding vanity…If a person wants to be vain on camera, so be it”its human nature to be vain. when life returns to a level of normalcy, there are hundreds of other ways people express their vanity everyday from their locations of their homes, to the clothes they wear and how much skin they are showing, boasting about their cars or vacations or their education attainments, the list is endless.

what destroys peoples souls that we should be concerned about is sin and the turning away from God and the Marxism that you are so warmly speaking of. Socialism removes men from the laws that God laid down for life and liberty. Socialism is the root ideology that directly leads to 150 million innocent men, women and children killed in the last 100 years in Russia, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, and is the same ideology that created and unleashed the Wuhan virus.

A potential downside to Zoom will be in the future where we might find that the words said on Zoom are recorded and will be used against us when the time comes and then we will know the true evil of the technologies we have created.

edwarddgiron
edwarddgiron
4 years ago
Reply to  Arnold Fishman

Zoom gives me a similar feeling of unease. I have used it for practical reasons because of Covid 19. I’ve even done a theatrical performance wherein we were all remote using Zoom. But the Zoom happy hours give me more if a feeling of isolation that being solitary doesn’t. I’ve not participated as a result, I find the concept of socializing in the two dimensional world just very disquieting. I need touch, real contact, and yes, the method of interaction in conversation that the article references which is not replaceable by videoconferencing. It’s terribly artificial, not quite the emperor’s new clothes, but almost as emotionally empty and unsatisfactory.

Jeremy Stone
Jeremy Stone
4 years ago

The sensation of one’s consciousness being drained out of one is palpable. I attribute it to three aspects of these conferencing platforms. First, and perhaps capable of elimination, the quality of the visual and auditory contact is so variable. Sound is often quite poor, sub-telephonic. Second, we suffer from the absence of normal interplay between different senses, and of our proprioceptive immersion in the three dimensional space that we normally inhabit. We have to work so hard to construct the interpersonal cues that we normally get without effort. This is physically tiring. Third, and to my mind metaphysically tiresome, is that one becomes an actor on one’s own screen, an homunculus escaped from inside, to be attended to as if a third person in the conversation. It is a happy accident that normal telephony does not create this perspective, this new form of self-conciousness. I don’t think Walter Benjamin would have liked it, but rather doubt whether dissipation of the aura is the reason why.

Kathy Lang
Kathy Lang
4 years ago

I suspect the clue to these different approaches lies in Anita’s words: “without the previous relationships already established, the effects you describe might be an issue”. My experience so far is that, in meetings of fewer than perhaps ten people, who all know each other face-to-face, Zoom is not only a good medium but has one surprising advantage over a conventional meeting: all the participants can see each other all the time. When all are sitting round a table, one can’t do that. But NOTHING can replace the physical contact or the “shared space”, especially of worship and most of all of Holy Communion. And THAT is not just a problem of remote consecration. It’s not called Communion for nothing – communion with God, certainly; real presence, certainly; but shared Communion with one’s fellow Communicants too.

Scott Allan
Scott Allan
4 years ago

You begin with a completely false statement about photography stealing the souls of Australian Aboriginals and First Nations in North America. Neither of these peoples ever subscribed to that assertion.

Aboriginal Australians concern with photography is seeing images of people who are deceased. Depictions of the deceased is a taboo here. The protocol is to first place a verbal and written warning with enough time for people to escape the exposure to these images.

I have filmed and photographed multiple clans in BC Canada and all I can say is the people love the camera. I have never heard or been told of any such superstition. There have been isolated individuals in early history such as Crazy Horse but beyond that it is false to assert this was common. (Ref: http://riic.ca/the-guide/in

Both groups do prefer permission is sought to photograph or film as many images of their cultures have been exploited without regard to them or misrepresented intensely sensitive beliefs these people hold.

As far as the rest of us Zoom or Bluejeans are a necessary part of our lives. Even before Corona 19 I was remote interviewing subjects for documentaries many times rather than travelling personally for professional work. In my personal life this mode of communication is vital for robust relations with friends and family. Especially I find grandparents and their grandchildren.

eddie.swales
eddie.swales
4 years ago
Reply to  Scott Allan

In Fairness to Rev Fraser, I think that the phrasing of his opening sentence, ‘Native Americans and Aboriginal Australians are SOMETIMES ASSOCIATED with the view that cameras can steal the soul’, lets him off the hook here.

Interesting contribution though. I always suspected that this notion was largely false.

Andrew Lale
Andrew Lale
4 years ago
Reply to  eddie.swales

People like Scott always misread and misinterpret so they can get in a good scolding. It’s what makes them alive.

bowkers
bowkers
4 years ago

I like Zoom. Compared to Skype it’s a Rolls-Royce versus a model T Ford. I’m afraid worries about a man-made belief system using it are very low on my list.

schaedellaura5
schaedellaura5
4 years ago

Is it possible that some personalities or generations enjoy using virtual meetings to a greater degree than others? While I respect and am thankful for it, in light of social distancing, I am mourning the loss of physical community. There is so much more to communication than the 2-D version Zoom provides. The spiritual aspect is dampened and interferred with. The technology will, at times, freeze faces in odd expressions, be out of sync, or boot someone out. It’s rude. But it’s all we have until God intervenes. Please God, forgive us, have mercy on us and intervene. Even as I jog or walk my dog, I notice fear in my fellow humans eyes as they pull their mask over their faces. Or, am I ascribing my own fears to them? Maybe they are just being socially responsible? It’s just that gesture of pulling a physical barrier up or moving far away, sends a message that my brain percieves as hostility or fear.

Thank you for this piece, as it has affirmed my feelings and thoughts and allowed me to grieve and lift my request to God for help and thank Him for providing our ultimate rescue in Jesus.

Anita Coltman
Anita Coltman
4 years ago

I have some further thoughts about Mr Fraser’s concerns relating to our dehumanisation by the very participation in a video conference. Firstly, I remembered the last few verses of 1 Corinthians 13. In verse 12 particularly, Paul states ” …now we see only as a reflection in a mirror; then we shall see face to face …”.
I wonder if the sense of unease about video conferencing could be connected to the frustration outlined in these verses concerning not only the yearning to know God, & be known by Him, but similarly the impossibility to fully know & be known by other people when using this medium.
Secondly, there is the Second Commandment’s prohibition about idols & our worship of them.
Is our worry about our soul’s diminution a reflection of God’s repugnance at what happens when we worship that graven image?

Dr Leah Remeika-Dugan
Dr Leah Remeika-Dugan
4 years ago

Exquisitely written, Revd Fraser. If I’m ever near St Mary’s Newington, especially on a Sunday, I’ll pay your church a visit.

In meantime thank you for ‘virtually’ putting into words part of what I’ve felt.

craig
craig
4 years ago

“Zoom takes away a piece of our souls”
Does it? Does it really?
An article so full of nonesense it really isnt fit for Underd.