https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3247-8733
-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Justin Grandinetti, Pandemic Pedagogy, Zoom, and the Surveillant Classroom: The Challenges of Living Our Advocacies in a Pandemic, Communication, Culture and Critique, Volume 14, Issue 2, June 2021, Pages 347–350, https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcab021
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
It’s the first day teaching my fall 2020 “Mobile Media and Communication” graduate course and I’m excited to log onto Zoom. It’s been roughly six months since COVID-19 outbreaks in the United States caused seismic shifts in just about every aspect of life as we know it. Despite a virus-mandated crash course in academic adaptation, I have missed synchronous pedagogical interaction since the pandemic forced university life online. Yet, all of my enthusiasm is tinged with a pang of guilt. I am, after all, a critical media studies scholar aware of Zoom’s privacy, surveillant, and technical issues. As I say hello to some new and familiar faces mediated by a platform that’s become as synonymous with videoconferences as Google is to search engines, I can’t help but feel I’m not living my own advocacies—am I a fraud and a phony for using Zoom?
While issues of “Zoom bombing” harassment and “Zoom fatigue” have taken center stage, there are a multitude of pressing concerns about Zoom use by institutions of higher education that have received far less attention during the pandemic. Zoom has been criticized by tech experts for misleading claims of end-to-end encryption (Lee & Grauer, 2020), issues of routing video calls globally (Whittaker, 2020), and a lack of security on recorded calls (Hodge, 2020a). These security liabilities were enough of a concern that the Taiwanese and German governments placed restrictions on Zoom use, and U.S. senators were reportedly told to avoid using the platform (Keane, 2020). While Zoom claimed to address these issues via security updates, there remain concerns about the platform sharing and selling user data (Brooks, 2020; Lyons, 2020). Zoom reports that the majority of the company’s revenue comes from paid subscriptions, its privacy policy allows the platform to share personal data with companies, organizations, and individuals outside of Zoom with consent (loosely defined), as well as with Zoom’s third-party partners. This includes account user and account holder data, geolocative information, persistent identifiers on marketing pages, and attended event data (Zoom Privacy Statement, 2021). Concisely stated by Hodge (2020b), “Zoom shares data with enough advertisers and data crunchers, in enough states, that it would broadly qualify as selling your data.” Finally, it’s important to consider how greater reliance on the high-bandwidth activity of videoconferencing intersects with infrastructural and device access divides (Correia, 2020). Even before the pandemic, studies of U.S. higher education found that roughly 20% of students reported issues achieving and sustaining web access, with disproportionate effects on students of color and students of lower socioeconomic status (Gonzales, McCrory Calarco, & Lynch 2018). These technical aspects of Zoom might not be as viscerally shocking as Zoom bombing nor as affectively relatable as videoconferencing fatigue; nevertheless, issues of privacy, security, surveillance, platformization, and digital divides represent immense concerns for a post-pandemic higher education system increasingly reliant on big tech platforms.
