[Xmca-l] Are Zoomspace and Meatspace Equally Both Mediated?

[David Kellogg]

I have been teaching three classes on-line through Zoom since mid-March,
and I have noticed very big differences in response patterns in Zoomspace
and the same classes taught face-to-face in "meatspace" one year ago. Like
Elizabeth Warren (when she taught at Harvard) I don't ask many "Anyone
know?" questions; like Elizabeth Warren I have found that when you use
"Anyone know?" questions, the rich just get richer and the poor stay poor.

So I tend to ask a question and then tag it with a name. On the one hand,
Zoom makes it easier to "go down the list" and make sure everybody gets a
question (and you can change the list each time you do this, e.g. by
switching from the Korean alphabet to the English one, so it doesn't LOOK
like you are following a fixed order). On the other, Zoom produces very
long pauses between the time I tag the question with a name and the time
the tagged person starts a reply, much longer than face-to-face classes do.
Last week I noticed, while transcribing the orals for some analysis, that
the wait time was almost proportional to the scores: with some correction
for male vs. female and Chinese vs. Korean students, I could predict the
final score from the length of the pause. It also seemed to me that in
general students who had fared worse with the conceptual material when I
taught them in meatspace fared even worse with Zoom, while those who had
done well in meatspace did even better on Zoom.

Assuming all that is true, why should it be the case? Meatspace is, of
course, mediated, but it's mediated face to face, through "nun chi" (that
is, "the color/tone/ambiance of eyes"); Zoom makes it impossible to know
which student the professor is looking at, approaching, gesturing to. Sight
is one kind of mediation, sound is another, and of course silent text is a
third, with all of the difficulties of mediation that LSV points out in
Chapter 6 of Thinking and Speech. But LSV also points out that these
difficulties represent not only difference but development. Students who
can deal with silent text mediation of concepts are "higher" in the sense
that by dealing with it, they prove that they can also deal with sound
mediation, but the reverse need not be true. Similarly, students who can
deal with sound mediation of visual-illustrative complexes (generalized
representations, such as we find in school children) can deal with sight
mediation--but not necessarily vice versa. Zoomspace and meatspace may be
very similarly related, and it's in that sense that they are not equally
both mediated.

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

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