I recently attended my first homeowners’ association meeting as a new resident of an over-55 community. Because of the pandemic it was conducted online via Zoom. It worked pretty well once participants were reminded to mute their microphones when they were not talking, and I enjoyed seeing my neighbors peering into their computers.
One effect of the Coronavirus is that much of the population has developed a comfort level with videoconferencing, from informal Zoom meetings to TV talk shows that look like Hollywood Squares.
It’s been a long time coming.
I started using videoconferencing when I worked for Illinois Bell 50 years ago. The big-deal technology then was the Picturephone. AT&T and Bell Laboratories had invested untold millions to develop a Star Wars-looking desktop box that housed a video camera and a five-inch, black-and-white TV screen. Someday every home will have one, we were told. It was a fun gadget but a little hard to take seriously.
The company equipped a conference room with a Picturephone in front of each person. In my first Picturephone meeting, with a few friendly colleagues in Chicago and New York, I had just walked into the building on a subzero February morning and kept my ski mask on for the first few minutes.
When a major company tried out the Picturephone in its Chicago headquarters, a few employees punked their colleagues by holding a photo of the CEO in front of the camera. We often wondered if the Picturephone would add a new dimension to the obscene phone call but that did not happen. As far as I know.
The Picturephone was a commercial disaster because it required more bandwidth than was practical for that era’s technology and was prohibitively expensive. For a number of years a few major companies used specially designed Picturephone conference rooms with big screens instead of Star Wars boxes. But the technology still was fragile: I once brought a reporter into our Picturephone conference center to interview a couple of executives in New York and was embarrassed when the video circuit went down.
The Internet finally made video conferencing feasible. In recent years I’ve participated in video meetings on a variety of Internet platforms. The technology mostly got in the way: The first half-hour of each meeting was spent in mutual tech support until everyone could see and hear one another.
A few years ago some of us went through a Skype phase, chatting online by video with friends and participating in meetings. I chatted with a former co-worker I had not seen in years and Skyped regularly with one of my cousins. Eventually the novelty wore off. I haven’t used Skype in a long time, and my cousin and I keep in touch on Facebook.
Zoom and other videoconferencing services probably will be a keeper after the pandemic abates as some people embrace working at home and distance learning. But I hope my homeowners’ association will return to in-person meetings. Maybe with refreshments.