People of a certain age grew up watching The Brady Bunch on TV. For that generation, the visual sequence that opens the show is iconic.
The cast appears in a 3×3 grid, with everybody taking turns looking at each other in up, down, left, right and diagonal directions. Everyone watching knew that they couldn’t actually see each other, and that they were filmed separately, but everyone loved the concept and the visual.
Zoom looks kind of like that, with everyone’s video face appearing in little square boxes. But it doesn’t have that cross-window eye contact.
As we emerge from the pandemic, many millions of people have gotten used to the visual iconography of Zoom. I wonder whether a new form of visual storytelling will eventually emerge from all this, one which combines the visual ideas of Zoom meetings with the visual ideas of that Brady Bunch opening.