Last weekend I was at Transmediale in Berlin, a pathetic spectacle of a crumbling media art/media critique/techno-political conference. Nonetheless, one of the talks by Silvio Lorusso was quite good and it was investigating, among other things, the hidden labor within video calls, the affective consequences of having to be on camera within your domestic space and other consequences of "zoom culture".
This made me think that in some political spaces there's a strong sentiment against using webcams, while in others, holding similar values, there's a strong sentiment against keeping the webcam off.
I believe the first position is mainly stemming from the trauma and discomfort of remote work, where the context of the workplace and your employer extraction of labor make some demands around webcams illegitimate, or extractive. This might not apply to the political context, but the trauma or simply the habit of being hostile towards the webcam demands is still there.
Let me summarize briefly the arguments from both sides:
Against webcams:
- webcams demand you to be presentable and make your space presentable. It's extra labor, especially for women.
- webcams highlight differences in lifestyle and privilege among the participants
- webcams have mild to serious impacts on people with different forms of body and gender dysphoria, alienating people even before they join the space. Also, they distract narcissists from the call.
- for specific activities, visual cues of the reactions of participants might impact the formulation of arguments by specific people, especially if insecure or shy. With the webcam off, you might not be able to read the room but sometimes it's a good thing.
In favor of webcams:
- they create intimacy and a stronger sense of presence. We can debate if this is a good thing at work overall, but it's obviously a good thing in political spaces. There's no collective action without this. they help you read the room and enrich communication, at least for those who are good at doing it.
- they help us position and frame the other person. Probably this should be a "neutral" point, because it enables both positive and negative biases. It depends on your beliefs and if you think that "unbiased=good" or "unbiased=bad".
I would like to hear from you how political organizations you've been have handled this discussion, if they did. How you feel about it. Also, I would like to hear if anybody experienced specific practices around turning the webcam on or off for specific activities, which to me seems an under-explored area, both for production purposes or political purposes.
No they don't. That's an artifical societal demand. Interacting in public with anyone "heightens the need" to be presentable, but there's no one forcing you to dress up nice or put on makeup.
IMO women need to take back the idea that we're expected to slather on makeup before we're "presentable". I prefer to think of myself as attractive, and makeup might enhance that for special occasions, but au naturel is my default for day to day, including webcams.
You cannot escape social norms. The act of rejecting them doesn't free you from them. You will be judged for rejecting them and others will adapt to it, either by rejecting them too and creating a new social norm, or shunning you and attaching a certain rejection to a specific social signal. There's nothing artificial on it. The logic you describe is very oblivious to how social norms and social actors work.
Also here we are talking about webcams not really as technological artifacts, but as social tools. Obviously it's not a technical requirement to be presentable, but a social requirement, that's implicit in the discussion.
I’m fairly confident you and the person you’re replying to are on the same page. Drop the word “artificial” in their post and nothing conflicts with what you’ve said.
They have made a call to action to reject the societal norm, that they are not oblivious to, and hope that it goes via the first of the two scenarios you gave.