By Neta Alexander

Neta Alexander is an Assistant Professor of Film and Media at Colgate University, New York. Her first book, Failure (Polity, 2020; co-authored with Arjun Appadurai) studies how Silicon Valley and Wall Street monetize failure and forgetfulness.

The following is a brief excerpt from a new essay by Prof. Alexander, to be published this fall in the collection Pandemic Media: Towards a Preliminary Inventory, eds. Philipp Dominik Keidl, Laliv Melamed, Vinzenz Hediger and Antonio Somaini. Lueneburg: Meson Press, 2020.

Zoom’s “waiting room”—where users patiently wait to join a meeting or a webinar—is a perfect metaphor for corona-capitalism. We anxiously wait for a job interview in a time of crippling recession; for an elementary school teacher with no formal training in remote teaching to babysit our child; for a video conversation with our elderly parents who we might kill IRL. We are confronted with an uncanny degree of self-awareness as we stare at ourselves through our webcams. Desperately trying to direct the mise-en-scene, we rearrange books on the shelf behind us to make our bedroom-turned-office look more professional.

The coronavirus pandemic transformed Zoom—a video conferencing platform established in 2011 and initially marketed to global businesses—into a heaven-sent solution for quarantine anxiety. This “Zoomtopia,” to use company parlance, ignores the limitations of the digital infrastructure, the ubiquity of internet trolls, and the unexpected disruptions that pop into the frame in the form of pets, children, or partners. The company’s ability to provide seamless video is now doubtful as an exponential influx of users encounter buffering issues, frozen screens, and any other digital noise once mocked by Zoom in its commercial from 2015. While Zoom has promoted a discourse of seamlessness, it is latency and waiting that have come to define our pandemic lives.

Building on my previous work on buffering as producing and sustaining “perpetual anxiety”—the oft-denied realization that we increasingly rely on machines and infrastructures whose logic is not clear or accessible to us—this new short essay explores three categories of buffering laid bare during the pandemic: pathogenic, infrastructural, and emotional. Informed by the recent interest in the history and regimes of waiting as an antidote to business models that hail speed and instant gratification, this triad analysis demonstrates why the study of latency regains a new urgency in a post-covid world.

Header photo by Cheng Feng on Unsplash