Gadgets

I’ve been reading Jason Lanier’s You are not a Gadget - and it has reminded me of a gadget that I dislike - the Chat function in Zoom. In a conversation with one of my sons, he defended the function as useful between two colleagues when watching a webinar - and on that I have no particular disagreement. What I object to is the interruption of chats to everybody. The sender assumes that the information he/she is going to provide is more important than that of the presenter at the moment. It is intended to he helpful but it smacks of self-importance.

What this does is to put a small bulletin on my gallery page view that annoyingly obscures the face of the speaker. Sometimes it is a link to a website in a font that is unreadable. If I am trying to follow what the speaker is saying, I don’t want to leap to another place and look at it now. When many are attending, “Hello” from wherever may be momentarily inspiring that the world is wide and extensive but it doesn’t survive as something important.

Lanier decries the ability of the trivial to become important and swamp attention from the main event. It is part of social media’s attempt to make everyone more important - without realizing that the herds we are creating are there for a reason - not to have more friends we hardly know or care about, but to send us more advertisements. It also shows how behaviour on one set of platforms is now influencing our behaviour on others. I won’t read your chats - and I’ll hardly ever send one.