Video Classes and the Embarrassment of Being Perceived

Illustration by Zoe Gigis

Every morning, I wake up twenty minutes or so before my first class starts. I pour myself a cup of tea, probably don’t make the bed, set up my laptop, and call in to discuss the Western literary canon or conceptions of homosexuality in colonial Latin America or whatever my liberal arts education has in store for me that day. The problem is, I spend most of the class staring at myself on screen. 

In Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, he describes a circular prison with cells lining the walls so that every inmate is completely vulnerable and in possession of prying eyes. In the center of the prison stands a watchtower with a light shining so brightly from its crown that it’s impossible to tell whether there are guards inhabiting the tower or not. Thus, the inmates must assume that they’re being monitored at all times and begin to monitor themselves. This is the Panopticon. 

On Zoom, we’re confined to a different kind of cell –– a tessellation of rectangles on a computer screen –– but, like the prisoners of the panopticon, we are both all-seeing and entirely visible. In a traditional classroom, it’s impossible to see everybody at once. We engage with one or a few people at a time, make eye contact that establishes listening and understanding, move fluidly between subjects and speakers. On Zoom, it’s impossible to only see one person at once, at least comfortably. Adjusting the session so that the person speaking takes up the whole screen eliminates the collage of disengaged faces, but there’s still a tiny portrait of myself in the corner. If I decide to hide my video feed from myself, I feel immediately and desperately self-conscious. Is there something in my teeth? Is it obvious to the professor that I’m listening? Do I look presentable?

This self-consciousness is kind of ironic. By all means, I should feel less self-conscious; my classmates can only see my upper body, and I can control the angle from which they even see that. Zoom has also stripped going to class of the need to even wear pants. Most of the time, I go braless, in my pajamas, makeup-free, and with a hairdo that could rival an osprey nest. But even when I dress up, I feel the same: like a lagging, pixelated specimen pinned, wriggling, to the screen. 

During the transition to online classes, I was not prepared for how uneasy seeing myself on video for five hours a day would make me. Disembodiment and detachment are what characterize my class experience now. It’s hard to reconcile the floating torso on the screen with the body I feel inhaling and exhaling, its spine pressed into a too-small desk chair and its fingers fiddling with a pen. Participating in class is equally uncanny; with all my classmates muted and blank-faced, it feels like screaming into the void. If nobody responds, it’s as if I’d never spoken. The sole evidence of my continued education is a recording in an archive that nobody will ever visit. Let’s be honest: who actually goes back and watches Zoom lectures to review the material? 

For me, there’s another feeling involved: embarrassment. Zoom infiltrates my living space, forcing me to share secrets with the class: the photo of Sylvia Plath I have tacked to my wall, my boyfriend asleep in the bed behind me, the closet door ajar and revealing my impressive collection of plaid pants. 

Taking classes over video calls shouldn’t feel like such a big step towards a total loss of privacy; that is if we have any privacy left to lose. Video chat apps like Facetime and WeChat are so widely used that we should be used to seeing ourselves on a screen. However, unlike social media, this isn’t a chosen surveillance. I’m not condoning invasive data collection by private corporations, but when you plug your personal information into Instagram or Facebook, you’re bound to know it’s headed somewhere. Much of the time, turning your camera off in class isn’t an option and could even result in penalization. 

I can’t offer a solution –– in terms of attending school during a pandemic, I don’t think that there’s a safer or superior alternative to online learning. What I can offer is a tidbit of reassurance:  it’s more likely than not that nobody is looking at you on Zoom. Simultaneously perceiving yourself and being perceived by others can lead to a projection of your own self-judgments on to others. Sometimes you just have to remember: nobody cares. Your classmates are probably too busy feeling self-conscious themselves.