Zooming in on Literature

We're all now the Zoom generation. Talking to friends, holding pubs quizzes or doing serious business and deals. It's Zoom, zoom ,zoom.

Our social Zooms last half an hour - we're too mean or canny to sign up to a monthly subscription. My poetry group's even cannier we log off and on again repeatedly to extend the analysis of our scribblings.

I had two Zoom meetings today. The first was a try out of webinar - that's the dictionary word of 2020 along with Covid and Trumpism (atavistic lying). There were five of us taking it in turn to be presenters and audience. We'd planned a series of mock presentations except it didn't work out that way.

First, those who came to the party had different level of Zoom expertise. I just log on and that's it except this morning I discovered I could do so much. I could have a background picture! Searching my picture library all I could come up with was copulating ladybirds.

Anyway, it gave our organisers the chilling experience of moderating a Zoom session with just five. And we're talking of webinars with up to a hundred.

The trouble is we all look so bloody serious on Zoom or, more usually incredibly facially distorted. There were faces of people I seriously fancied but when Zoomed - no way. I find joking on Zoom is risky. For a number of reasons. People who Zoom are genetically serious. People who Zoom are focused on the bottom line. Humour doesn't feed that. And frankly mooning on Zoom just looks gross.

Of course Zooming is a great way to see how the other half lives. Messy bedrooms, crumpled duvets on screen suggesting early morning shenanigans. Scattered bottles of Malbec highlighting near desperation and soon to be activated AA subscription.

The middle classes have twigged  to this so now when you Zoom what's in the background - a bloody mock up of the British Library. Every Zoom session I've been in had tidy ranks of books as the backdrop. Jane Austen and Val McDermid is the wallpaper of choice with a smattering of Ken Clarke and Karl Jung.

Surprisingly professions or occupation is not the key determinate of Zoom bookcase background. A software engineer may well have rows of Enid Blyton and Thomas the Tank Engine, while some Professor of this or that will expose his fetish for Pamela Anderson to one and all. There is a market here for downloadable library backdrops. My very limited research suggests that location plays a significant part in one's library backdrop. Certainly if Morse were alive in the Zoom era he'd have the Bodleian or the Royal Opera House Library framing his bonce as he interrogated some poor bastard suspected of chopping up the Nuffield Professor of Surgery.

We've been thrust into a new age. Distorted faces and dropped signals are now the new norm. I just hope we don't get bored or want to return to hot desking.