Six months later Zoom has become a verb, and Zooming has become a part of daily life.”īut what are the “unwritten rules” and are we following them? Can You Hear Me Now? The Etiquette of Zoom “As March began, few people had ever heard of Zoom, and many had never been part of a video conference. “There are only a few examples of corporate names becoming a part of our daily idiom and a verb in such a short period of time,” Jeffrey Cole wrote for the Center for the Digital Future in September 2020. While we may use Skype or WebEx or Microsoft Teams video conferencing software, we all know what someone means when they say, “let’s set up a Zoom call.”Īnd people certainly did with the Zoom mobile app downloaded an astonishing 485 million times in 2020. Zoom Meetings, the web conferencing platform, has been around since 2013 but it skyrocketed to popularity during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic as much of the world in lockdown needed an easy online way to communicate.īy April 2020, Zoom reached the milestone of 300 million daily meeting participants, and according to the software now registers over 3.3 trillion annual meeting minutes. Video Meetings “Zoom” to Popularity During the Pandemic To think that some of us had never heard of Zoom prior to the pandemic.

Zoom is certainly a new digital frontier – though not one where cats represent people in court – that poses new takes on age-old etiquette questions such as “to wait or not to wait” as in how long should we stay in our Zoom Call before jumping off when others do not show up?

I’m not a cat,” replies the lawyer … through the animated lips of a wide-eyed, forlorn-looking cat. Ponton, I believe you have a filter turned on in the video settings,” Judge Roy Ferguson, presiding over the case, says. Of course, we are mindful in our embrace of this new technology that we do not become a meme like rural Texas lawyer, Rod Ponton, who accidentally attended a 394 th Judicial District Court proceeding online stuck on a Zoom kitten filter. We live in a “Zoom World” where many interactions we previously had face-to-face such as client meetings, sales calls, and job interviews are now done over video conferencing.

Join zoom meeting with camera off