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.
My entire team and I work remotely (since before Covid), and it has never been an issue. Nobody puts any extra effort into their appearance, everybody wears sweats and loungewear and women don’t wear makeup. Most of us blur our backgrounds so nobody can see our spaces, but this does not imply anything about our homes other than the fact that we all like our privacy. I can even hear my manager’s breast pump going during meetings (it’s out of frame, obviously), and nobody cares, she’s got a baby to feed after all.
We’re all people with different lives, different homes, and different bodies. As long as we all get our work done, nobody cares what we look like, sound like, or how our homes are decorated. If you’re feeling undue pressure from your employer about what your personal appearance or spaces are like, I don’t think that company is a good fit. If there are genuine mental health issues at play, then a good company will make a reasonable accommodation to ensure your work doesn’t cause any undue harm.