Today is the third anniversary of my first ever use of Zoom. I taught a class on Zoom for the first time on the morning of March 12, 2020.
To put this into context, on the morning of March 11, 2020 I had not even heard of Zoom. But then came March 12, a Thursday. That was the day my University went suddenly and completely virtual, which it remained for a year and a half.
We now take Zoom so much for granted that we forget how recently most of us had never even heard of it. We would occasionally use Skype, but for most people it was not a primary means of communication. And then one day we were all transported into the opening credits of The Brady Bunch.
People are again meeting in person, but we will never go completely back to the way things were. I now have quite a colleagues around the world, people I have never met in person, with whom I regularly meet over Zoom to discuss shared research.
Zoom, it seems, is here to stay. Now if only they could fix the problem of who is looking at whom…