<aside> 📎 This page is the story of a commission as part of Round One of the Dream Fund, which was distributed in 2020 during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. This story is written by Hanna Thomas Uose in their own words, and should be explored with awareness that findings may have been impacted by this context.

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We need a new body language for remote working and organising across borders; one that builds empathy, trust, and ambition.

“As the body disappears so does our ability to empathise.”

—Jenny Odell

ZoomTraumaWorkshop.mp4

Many of us organise remotely because of distributed networks, restrictive border policies, low income, care responsibilities, or disability. We use methods like Skype or Zoom that erase our bodies from each other, leading to disjointed communications, unclear decision-making, low trust, and weak social bonds.

This project intended to draw connections between human biology, the [polyvagal theory](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3108032/#:~:text=The polyvagal theory proposes that,of behavior and psychological experience.) and technology to invent a new body language that enables us to increase our empathy and effectiveness within and across movements.

Intention

• Video calls, and remote working in general, are built for nervous system dysregulation. We’re never quite looking each other in the eye. The camera is constantly freezing. Our voices lag or speed up, are unnecessarily loud or quiet. People’s facial expressions slacken while they check emails at the same time. Hands are out of sight while we take notes. Our nervous system response is mostly unconscious, so whatever our collective conscious intentions are, they do not make much of a difference. Our bodies on a fundamental level do not feel safe with each other. We can come off a call and wonder ‘am I the only one who thinks that was a complete waste of time?’ or ‘did the thing I just said land totally wrong?’ and have no idea as to the answer.
• Calling it Zoom fatigue does not go far enough. The impact of working in this way is not just that we feel tired (bad enough) but that we are sitting in a low level trauma response for hours at a time. The impact is low trust relationships and a loss of memory associated with trauma and dissociation - I believe both of these effects deeply impact our collective ability to make decisions and to move forward.
• If it’s harder to come to decisions because of low trust, and it’s harder to remember decisions because of collective dissociation, then it’s harder to get real buy-in on any decision by a group working or organising remotely. It becomes a self-fulfilling cycle that results in unhappy staff and volunteers and a massive slow down of the organisation’s likelihood of achieving its mission.
• We think of Zoom as the tool we are using for remote connection, but that isn’t the only tool at our disposal - our bodies are the other. Except we don’t use our bodies to their greatest potential when remote organising, we pretend that Zoom is a replacement for in-person meetings and sit politely at our desks. The result is absurd. Rather than replicate the feeling of being together IRL (in real time), we transmute into a grid of floating heads, further alienating ourselves from each other.