Members of Curbed’s editorial staff as they work (and Zoom) from home (Mariam Aldhahi, Emma Alpern, Alyssa Nassner, and Mercedes Kraus). In this brave new world, our home interiors are our new avatars, and they’re more honest than most. Or it’s an inexplicably huge mansion somewhere, sprawling carpets, airy living rooms, and who even knows how or why an acquaintance has access to such a space? If you know where someone usually lives, then the sudden contrast of their background is instructive and unavoidable. Or it’s a cabin in the countryside, rented temporarily or bought previously, with a yellow-green field outside and flowers starting to bloom. Or it could be the confines of a childhood bedroom where work calls now need to be taken, if you landed (with proper precautions) at a parent’s home. The background of a chat with friends or colleagues might be a sliver of a city apartment, dark even during the middle of the day.
It shows off, intentionally or not, both where we choose to be and where we are able to be during this crisis. And yet that bit of information communicates so much, particularly in our current quarantine. It’s just what the camera of our laptop or phone can capture, a fixed, mechanical view. Occluded by the foreground subject of our heads like a Baroque portrait painting, the Zoom background is just a glimpse into whatever space we happen to be in at the time: the corner of a room, the top of a table, a slice of view from a nearby window.
As this platform becomes the new default of interaction, we also have to contend with it as a means of self-expression, which primarily occurs in the background of the window-the Zoom frame or FaceTime square. During the pandemic, communication, particularly professional communication, has turned to video chat for many of us.
For early-internet forum posting it was the avatar or the signature for instant-messaging it was the evocative away message for Instagram the like-grabbing selfie and for Slack the emoji response or aggressive DM. In COVID-19 quarantine, our constant video chats come with an added, sometimes involuntary, edge of domestic voyeurism and exhibitionism.Īdvances in digital technology have a way of inducing new habits that in turn create new forms of social etiquette and signaling, because humanity can’t seem to help itself when it comes to claiming individuality. A friend reclines in bed, talking just before going to sleep, against a backdrop of wrinkled sheets. Your parents cook dinner in your nostalgic childhood kitchen. A coworker’s houseplants look unhealthy, their room messy. The owner of your company sits in a mansion during an all-office Zoom town hall.
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