Is the mute button turning us into cyborgs?

Who would have imagined for a moment that the most powerful, most influential, most maddening bit of technology to have inveigled its way into our lives in 2020 would be a tiny little icon depicting a microphone that sits on the edge of our screens?

But if you wanted to summarise the experience brought about by the exigencies of the work-from-home environment, you could reduce it all to these three words: “You’re on mute!”

Actually, it’s probably six words, or even nine, because you have to yell it at least three times to the poor dolt who has forgotten, for the nine millionth time, that you have to hit a button before you start to speak.

That damnable button has sabotaged every “hangout”, halted every conversation and served to scramble every meeting conducted on a screen. The sight of a colleague waffling away in silence before the big prompt sends them flailing to broadcast their latest update is now such a well-known routine that it’s become near ritualistic. Like some ghastly turn of slapstick, we watch it time and time and time again.

Anthropologists have yet to offer any conclusive findings on the effect of long-term virtual working on our behaviour, and whether it will lead to any fundamental change. We have heard much about our resilience and ability to adapt to remote working, but I’m convinced the mute button is just one of a series of factors that are contributing to less desirable patterns in our attitudes to the workplace and our behaviour therein.

Once unheard-of behaviours in meetings are now routine: we check emails, answer doorbells and work from our beds

Mute offers us a strangely fluid relationship with the workplace. It’s an opt-out button whereby we can glide in and out of engagement with our colleagues. In one of the more extreme examples of that disengagement, this week found the esteemed legal analyst and writer Jeffrey Toobin exposing himself during a Zoom call while taking part in an “election simulation” with fellow writers at the New Yorker, in which he had been cast to play the US courts. “I thought I had muted the Zoom video,” he subsequently offered by way of explanation.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that we’re all about to debase ourselves in the same manner, but I do think that the long-term effects of attending muted virtual meetings have made once unheard-of behaviours now routine: we check emails, answer doorbells, work from our beds, hold conversations with other people, switch off our cameras so we can’t be seen . . . Our focus is increasingly distracted, and I would argue we’re in danger of forgetting that there are actual human beings, not cyborgs, sitting with us in the room.

Obviously, there are huge advantages in being able to phase out the white noise of the workplace. But I wonder if our capacity for normal interaction is being eroded as we remain encamped in our home offices, picking and choosing what we do. I have largely disagreed with colleagues who have championed the benefits of being in the office and the value of real-life face time, as I find that Google hangouts and Zoom conversations can be much more productive for generating ideas or working out how to get things done. There is an argument, however, that meeting up in person is becoming increasingly valuable as an exercise in basic conversation. We need to rehone our skills at being human beings once again.

Recently, I suggested on a whim going for a drink with a writer from another paper, someone I see rarely but of whom I am extremely fond. Not having seen her for months, I was struck by the awkwardness of making conversation: on the one hand there was almost nothing to catch up on. On the other, it seemed everything had changed. Plus. She seemed. So real. Freed from the flat screen of my usual conversations, I was suddenly bewildered by the three-dimensionality of our exchange. So much movement, so much hair and face and gesture. It made me wonder if I might be going slightly loopy after all. Maybe it’s me that’s becoming the cyborg.

Perhaps this is why so many writers, artists and other intellectuals, secluded in their garrets, have found other people far too human to endure. One thinks of those recluses — Marcel Proust, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson — whose sensitivities were so inflamed by interaction that they walled themselves up in their chambers and muffled out the world. Are we becoming keener in our human understanding, or are we slowly going mad?

The true costs of WFH are only starting to become apparent. Toobin’s scandal may well precede a spate of random acts of social impropriety, as the boundaries between the private and professional are further blurred. One thing, however, we must always be aware of: no man is mightier than the mute.

Email Jo at jo.ellison@ft.com

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