CommentsGELFAND’S WORLD--This will be a discussion about what is necessarily going to happen over the next several weeks, including more isolation for those of us who manage to avoid the virus.
As I plan to discuss, the waiting looks to be a lot longer than any of us were expecting, and perhaps even longer than a few of us will be able to stand. But along with that isolation, we will be adapting to civic life through what was, only recently, something out of science fiction. In a long-ago world of newspaper cartoons, the fictional detective Dick Tracy had access to something resembling a wrist watch but was, instead, a wrist radio. When that concept had been around for a while, the authors upgraded the wrist radio to a wrist two-way television set.
Today’s younger generation has never existed without Dick Tracy’s wrist television set, although they call it a cell phone and converse with each other via FaceTime or one of the other two-way video applications.
A few of us old dinosaurs have stuck with the habit of going to meetings over the past decade, but the buildup of Covid-19 has made us truly obsolete. Maybe we could stand on opposite sides of the street and shout to each other, but there would have to be a lot of private streets available and it would require people with operatically tough throats.
Meanwhile, computer and cell phone manufacturers have been building their instruments with the capabilities of functioning like Dick Tracy’s wrist TV, and internet providers have gradually been building out the band-width it takes to move dozens of video signals down the pipeline to you.
It’s as if they had foreseen something like the current Covid-19 situation, although they obviously did not. No matter – what technology has provided, we will take advantage of to engage in our social and civic and business dealings.
Video conferencing is not only here, it is fairly cheap and fairly easy to do. Over the last few days, I’ve experienced it both in the workplace and as part of the governmental arena.
As a fairly active participant in civic activities -- in my case, work, the science fair, and the neighborhood council system – I’ve gotten used to going to a lot of meetings, including at least a couple a month that involved the drive from the harbor to downtown Los Angeles. My colleagues made similarly long trips from the valley or west L.A.
On Saturday, through the once-science-fictional tool, a couple dozen of us held a meeting without leaving our own homes.
Not only that, but a few of us actually participated in two or three successive meetings on the same day. One group that does oversight of the Department of Water and Power (an important task) met first thing in the morning. Then at 10 am, the L.A. Neighborhood Council Coalition (LANCC) met directly with City Attorney Mike Feuer, again without any of us having to leave home.
At 2:30 pm, the group that has been planning the annual neighborhood council congress met and (as I shall explain) represented various stages of the grief process made famous by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross.
I would suspect that I’m a little newer to this technology than most, because I’ve only gotten full capacity to do FaceTime discussions on a cell phone fairly recently. An online video conference using Zoom or one of the other services is a lot like FaceTime except that there are many of us on the screen at the same time, each of us taking up our own little rectangle. In Saturday’s meeting, I could see half a dozen other participants, and when I wanted to get a chance to speak, I would either wave my hand or just say, “Excuse me, this is Bob Gelfand.”
This sort of meeting requires that all participants remain careful about the diplomatic niceties. You have to be careful to make sure that you have been given the next speaking spot, or else you and other people will be talking over each other in what turns into a cacophony. You can get the floor either by being called on officially by an elected chairman, or you can wait for a lull in the conversation and just ask to be heard.
And in this kind of meeting – kind of a new cultural invention – the way the others cede you the floor is simply to remain silent rather than to call out your name and invite you to take over momentarily.
For those who have had previous experience in amateur radio, such a video conference can make use of someone who will function as the equivalent of a net controller, although this sort of behavior requires that all the other participants understand the procedure too. I suspect that in the coming new world of widespread video conferencing, there will be a newfound set of accepted rules that will develop into its own culture.
How we dealt with the coming annual congress in a time of plague
The result of the new technical toy and the participation of a group of reasonably sensitive, polite people was that we could carry on a meeting – including some fairly intense deliberations – pretty much as if we were in the same room, in person.
So at 2:30 PM on Saturday, more than a dozen (and eventually approaching 2 dozen) folks signed in for a discussion of whether or not we could hold an annual congress even as late as mid-September. I should add that one or two of us were present only by audio link. In fact, one participant had his comments and votes relayed by somebody that we could all see by video image, and occasionally the relay person would hold up his cell phone to show us evidence of what his colleague was saying or voting.
That’s another thing about video conferencing. It is possible to hold up graphs or pictures for other participants to see. In a similar online meeting I attended for scientific purposes a few days earlier, I was able to hold up X-ray films that had just been developed earlier the same day. My colleagues were able to better understand the point that I was making, as that picture was worth at least a few hundred of my words. Some of us can remember when the process of publishing involved sending images to the darkroom or the illustrator, then mailing them to a publishing house in some other state, and then waiting for two or three months.
One social deficit has been built into the new technology. In a slightly more complicated way of doing things, it is possible for participants to pass along digital images from their own computers, a process referred to as screen sharing. This has its own risks, because it is not unknown for somebody participating anonymously to share pornography rather than useful information. That’s what happened when the City Council tried to engage in a video meeting without taking appropriate care to prevent this process – what is now referred to by some of my colleagues as “Zoom-bombing.”
To get back to the meeting about the congress: We voted to cancel it. This decision was made by the large majority of participants (with 3 or 4 saying No) in spite of the fact that the congress had originally been scheduled for the latter half of September. I would like to make disclosure that I was one of those who voted to cancel, and I will add here the gist of the remarks I made in service of that vote:
We are obviously still in the uphill phase of the epidemic, with both cases and deaths rising in number and accumulating on a daily and weekly basis. If the peak appears along the end of April or sometime in May, then we might (not unreasonably) expect the epidemic to continue on for almost as long as it took to develop – that is to say, it could continue for another 4 months after the peak. That means that people will still be getting sick in August and September.
I disagree, however, with those who say that things will never be the same. Yes, we will remember 2020 as The Lost Year, and we will have a lot of asterisks in the record books when it comes to baseball, basketball, and the Olympics. But there will be a moment when we can come out of our homes and go back to restaurants and movies.
When will that moment be? My prediction is that it will come when 100 million Americans have been vaccinated against the virus. For me, it will be ten days or two weeks after I have gotten the shot myself.
The stages of grief for our cancelled events
The decision to cancel the annual neighborhood council congress was obviously an unhappy one for some of our participants. I explained that I sympathized with their frustration, as I had been through a similar experience when we had to discuss – and ultimately carry through with – cancelling the annual state science fair. In any other year, the fair would have brought more than a thousand people into proximity for a full day, and was obviously something that could not be allowed to happen in 2020. But we discussed and debated how we might put on some alternate event using email and possibly online interviews. For various reasons this was found to be impractical, just as we decided on Saturday that the congress wasn’t going to fly. But we had the same protests and proposed alternatives that I remember making myself for the science fair.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross seems to have gotten it right in both cases. We go through a series of reactions beginning with denial, and proceeding through anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance. As of Saturday, some of my colleagues hadn’t gotten to acceptance yet.
I can understand and empathize with peoples’ feelings over these lost experiences, but on a larger scale, there are a lot of baseball fans (and perhaps coming up, football fans) who will miss what is a major part of their lives.
An important signal
It’s curious how quickly the NBA responded to the anticipated epidemic, without going through the token quarantine of a few players, but just cancelling wholesale. I think that this action by professional basketball functioned as a much-needed signal to the populace as a whole, that this is a serious matter that cannot be avoided. Had the national administration acted as efficiently, this country would have been spared the deaths of a few thousand people at the least.
Addenda
Kevin Drum’s blog is one of the best sources for well presented, concentrated information on the current status of the epidemic. You can find it here. For the rest of the blog, look here.
As I mentioned in a previous column, an up to date map of the epidemic on a state by state basis can be found here.
Humor in a time of plague: I don’t have any deep-seated objection to gallows humor, but I haven’t seen much about Covid-19 that works all that well. Late night talk show hosts have adapted by doing one-man shows from their homes. The interviews seem to work OK, but I doubt that these interim shows will end up in the most popular rerun lists.
One curious change: In watching current run shows (which were presumably shot just a couple of months ago), the fact that the stars are shown running through crowds of people on city streets comes across as odd to me. It was perfectly normal at the time it was written and shot, but it still comes across as a little weird in this time of the new normal. On the other hand, advertisers who make TV commercials have adapted instantaneously.
The webinar will need to be redesigned
There is this thing referred to as the webinar, which involves a bunch of us sitting passively while some speaker tells us about the latest monoclonal antibody or whatnot. Then we can submit questions by email. Obviously the highly interactive format of video conferencing is going to make the old fashioned webinar obsolete. Some synthesis will come out of the two methodologies.
The anti-vax group is left high and dry
The anti-vaccination crowd are absolutely totally flipping out over the reality of Covid-19, because the solution is to develop a vaccine and then give it to most of us living humans. The current situation has therefore revealed just how crazy they actually are, as they twist and turn to create some alternative reality. Somehow, they want us to believe that the virus is the creation of conspirators (or the Chinese) and that it was released in time to hurt Trump’s reelection chances. Some conspiracy theorists mention Hillary by name.
Remember what I said in a previous column – that if the anti-vaccine people had their way, then what we are going through right now would be the norm for every year, except that the diseases would be more widespread and the death toll would be higher. It’s time for rational people – including our elected officials – to tell them off for once and for all.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
