Living Well

Zoom provides connection without communication

Communication involves eye contact, posture, gestures, timing and movement, tone and speech - nuances that are lost with video conferencing

I am ready to admit, I'm all Zoomed out. Life is now governed by webinars, live streaming, online performances, lectures and panel discussions, all via Zoom.

A few months ago, who could have imagined an orchestra of musicians playing a symphony together from separate locations, a virtual dinner with friends or visiting an art gallery in the same manner. Weddings and birthday parties, home schooling or spiritual retreats, theatre visits, church services or medical consultations - we are all working, studying, teaching, praying and playing from home via Zoom.

One of the surprising elements emerging from this pandemic is that, old or young, we are all evolving in technical expertise. Within the giant stepping stones of human evolution, our present more personal Zoom forward may appear trifling, but it is already changing our social functioning in many small ways.

Zoom has become the moniker of our pandemic times. Although hardly known to the public before the pandemic, the technology is not new. For the past decade, Zoom has served mostly businesses hosting webinars and training.

Its sudden and ubiquitous use by almost every person around the world is as novel as the virus that has put people in this curious position of enforced ingenuity.

Unexpected growths of ingenuity are not confined to the human species, but to all life that shares with us some form of awareness. That includes plants, amoeba, fungi, algae and every kind of mould. It also includes our present enemy, Covid-19, whose wily intelligence must, however begrudgingly, be respected as a form of cognisance, even if rudimentary.

The human brain is far from rudimentary and contains more than 100 billion cells.

Through the power of human ingenuity, spacecraft is now exploring interstellar space beyond the known universe. Yet, the innovation of Zoom, and other scientific marvels, although furthering technological prowess, do little to advance or deepen human interaction.

The ingenious Zoom is a slippery thing. While it keeps people brilliantly connected in this time of isolating lockdown, it removes from the meetings all that is essential in human communication.

The missing element of soul is now causing large numbers of people to suffer from Zoom fatigue. As the culture of lockdown continues, Zoom's prolonged substitution of a virtual exchange for normal physical contact is revealing just how deeply human interaction nurtures and sustains people.

The magic working of Zoom is an invisible thing. Click on a link and there it is. Few people know how it works.

Nicaragua's charming Granada, a short drive from its capital of Managua, boasts one of the world's most intact Spanish colonial architecture.

In the same way, the magical working of the human existence is equally invisible.

We cannot locate a thought in our physical being, let alone explain what a thought actually is, and we equally cannot explain an emotion. Science may have Voyager 1 and 2 tearing through interstellar space, but it has no idea what consciousness is.

Except for our physical body, which can be touched and seen, who we really are is essentially invisible, both to others and also to ourselves. Our entire conceptual world happens invisibly inside us. Our joys and pains, our feelings and perceptions, our memories and phobias are all part of an unseen and mysterious Presence that inhabits our bodies and that we call I, and through which we experience the world and connect with others.

Touch is the fundamental language of human connection and our desire for physical contact starts at birth.

Touch helps regulate our digestion and sleep, strengthens our immune and cardiovascular system and much more. Even a handshake at the beginning of a business meeting can set that meeting on an affirmative trajectory.

Researchers at the University of Chicago found that in response to the simple gesture of shaking hands, the centre of the brain is activated and energised by the sharing of emotional warmth.

Energy medicine is a branch of integrative medicine that studies the science of therapeutic applications of subtle energies.

The human energy field is a modern phenomenon of interest across disciplines and it has gained increasing attention in recent years. It is defined as a luminous halo of energy that extends beyond the physical body, and flows from people in higher and lower frequencies.

We are unaware of this life force, a bio-electric magnetic field that radiates from not only ourselves but also plants, animals and all life forms, including one-celled organisms and some almost inanimate objects.

In 1939, Russian technician Simon Kirlian observed light emitting from his fingers when exposed to a photographic plate in a high voltage area. He developed the first camera, the Kirlian Camera, to photograph this strange electromagnetic field. Over the years, other energy-scanning inventions have followed.

The aura Kirlian photographed has always been visible to clairvoyants, mystics and shamans. Our aura is a storehouse for positive and negative energies, and its seven detectable layers are said to correspond to the seven chakras, and its colours and clarity to indicate our degree of bodily health.

We are essentially a dynamic field of energy. Communication between people is but a delicate and nuanced interplay of this energy, that scientists call synchrony. When we meet, much of our communication is non-verbal and undetectable; a transmission of empathetic energy through eye contact, posture, gestures, timing and movement, tone and speech. We can even communicate with another person while sitting together in silence.

According to researchers at Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab, meetings via Zoom eliminate these nuances, and so reduced our ability to synchronise with each other. Trying to decode a face in a small square on a screen, or a Gallery view of multiple small faces, is challenging to the brain's central vision.

The work of trying to synchronise with others, without the clues and context of non-verbal markers and the signals requisite at any physical meeting, is apparently what exhausts us in virtual contact. We are social animals and used to physical and emotional intimacy.

We know that looking directly into another person's eyes, even those of a stranger, joins us in an immediate manner. Our separateness vanishes and whether we feel warm or cold or neutral emotions towards the person before us, a vital energy connects us.

We are united in our common humanity, the sameness of our essence and uniformity of our response to life. Love, warmth, community; all human feeling is only our shared humanity.

Zoom gives us nothing of this. It connects us without allowing us to communicate. A strange situation indeed.

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A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Straits Times on October 12, 2020, with the headline Zoom provides connection without communication. Subscribe