Well written and timely article. There is an “eleventh” observation for me but it’s not really uniquely new to Zoom, it feels Zoom is just a continuation and maybe an acceleration and accentuation. The digital age combined with data collection/big data analytics, machine learning and non-geographic selective social interaction has facilitated what some call “echo chambers” and excessive “individualization”. The post modern corporate human is familiar with contrived meetings — they were lampooned repeatedly by Gary Larson in his cartoon series “The Far Side”.

The world of the 19th century (I did not live in it but do a fair amount of non-fiction reading) was agrarian and connections were fairly non-selective. Consider no electronic media and limited transportation — the interactions had a very natural quality and were coincidental nearly wholly confined to the people and relationships one naturally happened to be around.

I’m hopeful for a “New Age” of peace and understanding across divides. An alternative may be a dystopian experience of complete smoke stack isolation to electronic self selected groups vested in their own realities that fit contrived isolation. Maybe neither of these two and something unguessed but in any case it seems to me my accelerated Zoom land participation feels a little more like “The Far Side” than neighbors casually talking and trading stories at the fence post of their adjoining farms.