[Air-L] New Book Announcement: "You're Muted": Performance, Precarity, and the Logic of Zoom

[Mark Nunes]

Cassandra Ozog and I are pleased to announce the launch of a new collection
of essays entitled *"You're Muted": Performance, Precarity, and the Logic
of Zoom. <https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/youre-muted-9798765108284/>*

The year 2023 marked the end of the World Health Organization's
classification of the COVID-19 outbreak as a “public health emergency of
international concern,” yet many of the organizational and institutional
restructurings that occurred in the rapid response to the pandemic have
remained firmly in place. The prevalence of videoconferencing in everyday
life marks one such instance, not only highlighting the dramatic social and
cultural transformations that occurred during a period of lockdowns, social
distancing, and stay-at-home orders, but also serving as an index of all
that has emerged as the “new normal” since March 2020.


Overnight, it seemed, Zoom emerged as the default videoconferencing
platform, rapidly morphing from brand name to eponymous generic. While this
volume focuses predominantly on Zoom and its place in the collective
imagination and daily practice of those of us whose lives are profoundly
caught up in digital networks, many of these insights presented here apply
to other videoconferencing platforms as well, and a supporting logic that
has governed neoliberal lives since long before the first lockdowns began.
The twelve chapters in this collection explore how videoconferencing
platforms in general, and Zoom in particular, have provided individuals and
institutions new modes of “engagement,” while at the same time reifying,
normalizing, and domesticating modes of surveillance, control, and
marginalization that have been part and parcel of a networked-based
performative logic for nearly a century.

This title is available through Bloomsbury Academic as hardback, PDF
e-book, and Epub/Mobi.

Mark Nunes and Cassandra Ozog