Spotlight The pandemic didn’t shatter society, Zoom did During lockdown technology has exacerbated difference and atomised lives BY Timandra Harkness . Imagine a vision of the future. Photo by JACOB KING/POOL/AFP via Getty Images Timandra Harkness presents the BBC Radio 4 series, FutureProofing and How To Disagree. Her book, Big Data: Does Size Matter? is published by Bloomsbury Sigma. January 4, 2021 TimandraHarknes January 4, 2021 Filed under: CoronavirusCovidlockdownTechnologyZoom Share: Thank you science. Last February, predicting a working Covid-19 vaccine within 18 months seemed wildly optimistic. Less than a year later, we have two ready for injection, and another well on the way. When today’s teenagers can get back into their school or university laboratories, we could see a new generation inspired to become scientists. Science will get us out of a lockdown that technology made possible. The assumption that everyone now has internet access let governments tell people to work from home, consult their doctor through a screen, claim emergency handouts online, and stay in touch with relatives and friends via Zoom. In reality, a significant minority of UK adults were not online. In 2019, 7.5% had never used the internet. Almost a third of retired people, and over 10% of disabled adults, were not internet users before the pandemic. But in March 2020, many reluctant late adopters were faced with the choice of virtual or nothing. In parallel with the global boost to vaccine development, Covid-19 has accelerated our shift to online relationships. When physical shops closed, consumers moved online, and we won’t entirely move back again. Remote consultations with doctors and other professionals are also here to stay. Our personal relationships were increasingly conducted through screens even before 2020. Now, the same parents who were baffled by the always-connected, never-actually-present nature of their children’s friendships are running family WhatsApp groups and setting up Zoom quizzes. As we emerge, blinking like bears, into a post-Covid summer, those devices which connected us will still be clutched firmly in our paws. Although I foresee a euphoric embrace of face-to-face, not to mention skin-to-skin, human contact, I also predict that interaction through the safe filter of technology will be more firmly embedded than ever in most people’s lives. New divides emerged in 2020, as existing social differences were catalysed by crisis into visible cracks. Those who embraced working from home, and are not keen to return to the commute and the office routine, are generally older people with families and bigger houses. They have enjoyed the freedom to fit the school run into their day, spend less time on the train and more in the garden, less time with annoying colleagues and more with Lockdown Puppy. Younger workers, hunched over laptops in shared flats and houses, show less enthusiasm. For them, going out to work is an opportunity to learn informally about the job and workplace culture, to meet people, to explore the wider world beyond their front door. More from this authorPublic trust? There’s no app for thatBy Timandra Harkness Then there are the workers whose jobs cannot be done from home. Less than half of UK employees worked remotely during the pandemic. Unfortunately, most of the media fell into the working-from-home side of that divide. That skewed the narrative of 2020 towards questions of sourdough and birdsong, and away from the continuing reality of people whose jobs still had to be done in worse conditions, or those whose work evaporated overnight. These divides won’t continue in exactly these forms, though they will add to the many fractures in society. What will persist, exacerbating the splits and hampering our ability to recover from both pandemic and economic shock, is the atomisation of society. Instead of a country united in the face of Nature’s novel threat, we split into millions of individuals, separated into households or “support bubbles” (as if every single person is only a mental health patient waiting to happen). The normal, informal, everyday encounters that remind us we’re all human, and not so very different, were severely restricted by law. Instead, we built connections online, seeking out what scratched our itch, whether that was friendly networks to lift our spirits, or groups whose analysis of the crazy world confirmed our own instincts. Little wonder that rational scepticism about politicians or medical authorities slid so easily into conspiracy theories. In the pub, or across the workplace coffee machine, the idea that Bill Gates is microchipping the population is quickly laughed out of existence. On the internet, you can always find a YouTube video to tell you it’s true. The shift towards more working from home, for those who can, makes it hard to build any workplace ethos of professionalism, of teaching younger colleagues, or of solidarity with your fellow employees. Universities may be able to deliver lectures online, but it’s hard to cultivate any sense of a shared project of scholarship in virtual seminars, especially with no trip to the bar afterwards. More from this authorThe Government's Covid scaremongeringBy Timandra Harkness Transferring cultural, or political, or sporting events online revealed how much more an audience is than a number of individuals who watch and listen. Without them, performers, speakers, or players, have no focus, no feedback, and no sense that this occasion is unique in happening here, now, with this specific group of people, transformed into a whole greater than its parts. I hope that we enter 2021 with a much deeper sense of why shared, public, social life is important, and a commitment to restoring it as fast as possible. I fear that there are long-lived social forces moving against that. Re-starting the economy is going to be much easier than knitting together the unravelled strands of a society that already lacked coherence and trust. There are practical reasons why managers might welcome the persistence of virtual, individual connections, instead of shared spaces. Employers can save on rent and bills, universities sell their educational products to a worldwide audience. Routine interactions are on the record, so everything can be supervised and surveilled. There are also good reasons for continuing to accommodate online participation. Obstacles of geography, physical disability or family responsibilities need no longer exclude. Travel time and expense can be slashed. Suggested readingDo humans have a future?By Tom Chivers But the trend towards relating to the world as individuals, through technology that makes even informal conversation more controllable, was already well under way. We, the individuals in question, have often been willing to embrace it. American teenagers, surveyed before Covid, slightly preferred texting their friends to meeting them in person. In a world that often feels out of our control, we can at least edit our selfies and choose our words carefully as we “chat”. Spontaneous, real world situations are more risky. This unwillingness to engage with risk also underlies official reluctance to allow group situations to resume. The tendency to see crowds, or even crowded pubs, as unsafe for Covid reasons was built on a suspicion of crowds as unpredictable gatherings of people who might get an idea into their collective mind, and act on it. How much safer, and easier, to gather people on Zoom, or to relate to them as individuals, each in their private space, through an app. For better and worse, our immediate future will be more atomised, more mediated by technology, than ever before. How far 2021 goes towards restoring what is valuable about shared, unmediated human life, whether intimate or public, is an open question. Share: Join the discussion Harkness unfortunately wastes a good opportunity to illustrate the fallacy of replacing human contact with virtual by starting from false premises. 1) That the virus is as deadly as claimed: At worst, an Infection Fatality Rate of 0.2% according to Stanford University medical experts; even less on the US CDC chart, especially the younger the age group; 2) that the vaccines now being rolled out will “save” us: given that both placebo controls and animal experiments have been skipped, and that a hitherto unprecedented RNA vaccine is being developed, the COVID vaccines can only be described as “experimental drugs,” already shown to have a high rate of adverse reactions even among healthy 35-year-old test subjects; and 3) by implication, that screen learning and work will somehow replace human contact; many neurological studies show the reverse: that educational outcomes are reduced, not enhanced, by immersive screen tutoring. She does however get it right about the social consequences; humans are social animals and here again, neurological studies show that touch is vital to a child’s brain development, not to mention to emotionally healthy adults. Her point about the impact on the arts is a vital one: without direct contact with an audience, performing artists are performing in a vacuum and their art will suffer accordingly. Having already watched one “concert” via Zoom I’m not eager to tune into another one: you could tell the musicians were suffering for want of the energy of a room filled with people, their performances stilted and uninspired. yea, well, you miss the biggie. If you can do your drudge computer based job at home so can someone in Manila and Mumbai in their homes. Most workers cost about double their pay through the pension, NI, tax, facilities, and so on. These guys will contract to do your job without any of these costs, and at half the pay equaling 1/4 your cost. As TVs manufacturing 100% offshored so will drudge computer based work. Once long distance phone calls got reduced India set up colleges to teach call center qualifications. Language, social norms, and so on in English, and off shore went the call centers. Same as with TVs and call centers will go your job. The office was your protector! It took a work visa to get in it. No longer with work from home. You sheep just invited the wolves into your safe paddock and you are doomed! Electronic communication is irremediably dangerous to individuals, as I experience speedy implementation of top-down IT communication from government to individuals here in France. Such communication increases powers of the already powerful more and faster than it increases rights, powers and opportunities of individuals. A government department, or an employer, can send you a message without affording right of reply, and where right of reply exists, its content may be controlled/censored/manipulated by electronic communication ( using multiple ‘choice’ tricks: ‘which of the following is your complaint’) to an extent impossible where the individual composes her/his own reply, choosing her/his language, terms of reference and evidence submitted. It makes it easier to fix legal responsibility for ‘having received notice’ on individuals and more difficult to fix responsibility on the powerful ‘sender’ of messages. It makes it possible for the powerful to simply destroy record of an exchange where the exchange is inconvenient. Electronic communications are like mirrored windows used in police interrogations: those on the powerful side can ‘see’ the individual, but not vice versa. In my view, all individuals have political, ethical and material stakes in such big changes in power relationships, all the more so when changes are rapid and dressed up as ‘progress’, and it seems to me critical for individuals to retain the right (power) to communicate via alternative modes if preferred -letter, via legal counsel, via face-to-face confrontations. To get involved in the discussion and stay up to date, become a registered user. It's simple, quick and free. Sign me up
Harkness unfortunately wastes a good opportunity to illustrate the fallacy of replacing human contact with virtual by starting from false premises. 1) That the virus is as deadly as claimed: At worst, an Infection Fatality Rate of 0.2% according to Stanford University medical experts; even less on the US CDC chart, especially the younger the age group; 2) that the vaccines now being rolled out will “save” us: given that both placebo controls and animal experiments have been skipped, and that a hitherto unprecedented RNA vaccine is being developed, the COVID vaccines can only be described as “experimental drugs,” already shown to have a high rate of adverse reactions even among healthy 35-year-old test subjects; and 3) by implication, that screen learning and work will somehow replace human contact; many neurological studies show the reverse: that educational outcomes are reduced, not enhanced, by immersive screen tutoring. She does however get it right about the social consequences; humans are social animals and here again, neurological studies show that touch is vital to a child’s brain development, not to mention to emotionally healthy adults. Her point about the impact on the arts is a vital one: without direct contact with an audience, performing artists are performing in a vacuum and their art will suffer accordingly. Having already watched one “concert” via Zoom I’m not eager to tune into another one: you could tell the musicians were suffering for want of the energy of a room filled with people, their performances stilted and uninspired.
yea, well, you miss the biggie. If you can do your drudge computer based job at home so can someone in Manila and Mumbai in their homes. Most workers cost about double their pay through the pension, NI, tax, facilities, and so on. These guys will contract to do your job without any of these costs, and at half the pay equaling 1/4 your cost. As TVs manufacturing 100% offshored so will drudge computer based work. Once long distance phone calls got reduced India set up colleges to teach call center qualifications. Language, social norms, and so on in English, and off shore went the call centers. Same as with TVs and call centers will go your job. The office was your protector! It took a work visa to get in it. No longer with work from home. You sheep just invited the wolves into your safe paddock and you are doomed!
Electronic communication is irremediably dangerous to individuals, as I experience speedy implementation of top-down IT communication from government to individuals here in France. Such communication increases powers of the already powerful more and faster than it increases rights, powers and opportunities of individuals. A government department, or an employer, can send you a message without affording right of reply, and where right of reply exists, its content may be controlled/censored/manipulated by electronic communication ( using multiple ‘choice’ tricks: ‘which of the following is your complaint’) to an extent impossible where the individual composes her/his own reply, choosing her/his language, terms of reference and evidence submitted. It makes it easier to fix legal responsibility for ‘having received notice’ on individuals and more difficult to fix responsibility on the powerful ‘sender’ of messages. It makes it possible for the powerful to simply destroy record of an exchange where the exchange is inconvenient. Electronic communications are like mirrored windows used in police interrogations: those on the powerful side can ‘see’ the individual, but not vice versa. In my view, all individuals have political, ethical and material stakes in such big changes in power relationships, all the more so when changes are rapid and dressed up as ‘progress’, and it seems to me critical for individuals to retain the right (power) to communicate via alternative modes if preferred -letter, via legal counsel, via face-to-face confrontations.