Why Weren’t We Video Calling All Along? - The New York Times

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A couple of weeks ago, my mother and father, my sister and brother-in-law, and my fiancé and I had our first-ever group FaceTime.

I watched my mother, jealous of my sister’s glass of wine, leave the room only to return with a whole bottle. I stared at my father’s headless torso while he somehow struggled to master his camera angles. We showed off our respective cats, who were all much less interested than we were as we took turns retelling quarantine stories. It was a bit chaotic, and utterly charming.

It’s been two years since I moved with my fiancé from New York to Los Angeles. My sister is back in our hometown, Brooklyn. And my parents are in Boston. For a while now, we’ve been separated by many hundreds of miles and several time zones. But it wasn’t until this pandemic cleared everyone’s calendar for the foreseeable future that we have started to habitually use this virtual technology to stay connected. Even though it’s been easily available to us iPhone users for a decade — ever since FaceTime was first announced by Apple’s Steve Jobs in June 2010 at one of his classic conference presentations.

For many people, across generations — but particularly for a hard to define yet unmistakably real group of millennials, now ages somewhere from 26 to 36 — video calling was cool right after it first became possible to do. And then, at least in my circles, the novelty wore off and our use of it steadily fell out of style.

My college group chat has existed since we all scattered to the winds a few years ago: The group consists of a journalist based in Hong Kong, a software engineer in South Carolina, a content designer in Thailand, an e-commerce associate in New Jersey and a handful of New Yorkers — mostly staying in touch with the occasional inside joke or meme on a What’s App thread.

Now, searching for a more grounded remote community amid these crises, we’ve moved to a weekly Zoom meeting. The sessions go on for so long — with countless extensions of the originally subscribed 40 minutes — that the East-Coasters all but beg to be released for bedtime.

Somehow, even though I rarely saw my New York friends in the Before Times, I’ve been missing their faces more. Their wisecracks and constant, clever one-upmanship. All the while, I could have just asked for this — a modest video call to catch up — whenever I wanted to. But I didn’t. And if you’re a bit like me, you probably didn’t either.

So many of us lucky enough to be economically mobile have loved ones in far-flung places. And so many of us hadn’t been making up for that distance through screens as often as we are now. There are those who find this surge in video calling annoying, even smothering. But I’ve heard more about it being a welcome salve.

From what I can see, people aren’t just Zooming to re-create visits with friends and family who live across town. I know grown children, a plane ride away from home, who are FaceTiming into their parents’ anniversary dinners when previously they might have just called. Women I know are digitally attending fitness classes, led by their beloved old instructors, in the places where they used to live. In April, my friends sang me “Happy Birthday” via Zoom in a joyous, off-key cacophony; last year, I merely received a handful of cheerful texts from those who couldn’t celebrate in person. These days, my mother has a weekly virtual happy hour with her friends from high school — Miami Beach High, Class of 1970! Usually, they just email or have the occasional lunch, maybe once a year.

These changes most likely never would have happened before the virus upended the world as we knew it.

I’ve gone beyond replacing encounters I could have had in a pre-Covid-19 world. I’ve started creating connections with a meaningfulness that doesn’t place a premium on geographic proximity. Connections that don’t need post-work drinks, housewarming parties or friendly catch-ups at hard-to-book dinners to be sustained — though I do miss all of those things deeply and am cautiously optimistic about phased-in reopenings.

So why, actually, are so many of us only just now making video calling a habit? Did I really not see my parents’ faces for months on end, even over a screen, simply because I had the option of socializing with my partner and nearby friends instead? Was I actually “just super busy” or did I want to avoid confronting how much I missed them? How I was quietly nursing the loneliness of feeling like I might not truly know the people I can’t see in person anymore.

Amid the continuing carnage in this country, I can’t bring myself to make a rhetorical turn toward a silver lining. The pleasant paradox of families and friends like mine getting in more quality time in the age of social distancing feels moot when there’s a national reckoning on racism and the scourge of police violence against black people; when every day thousands of people are still contracting a disease that could kill them — that has already killed more Americans than several wars did. There is no public plea here to boldly carry this newfound sense of connectedness with us into the new normal, whatever that is.

For me, that kind of optimism would be a sleek betrayal, albeit a convenient one: Focusing on the good in all of this would be much easier than admitting the truth — that I could have reached out to my loved ones at any moment, but didn’t until this pandemic made me feel as though I was hanging on by a bare thread.

The other night, my fiancé and I watched an episode of “The Twilight Zone,” the classic series full of far-off imaginings from the ’60s about what the future and its life-changing technologies would hold: flying saucers, body swapping, professional boxing robots, etc. The particular episode we watched that evening had a scene that featured a video call — this futuristic tech that could link us face-to-face with anyone in the world, anytime we desired. A miracle, sitting in my purse for years, and I barely ever used it.

Ali Drucker (@ali_drucker) is the author of the forthcoming book “Do As I Say, Not Who I Did: All the Sex Advice No One Tells You Before You Go to College.”

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Why Weren’t We Video Calling All Along? - The New York Times
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