The arrival of COVID resulted in many clubs moving their meeting to Zoom or another online platform. My clubs still meet online for executive committee meetings, but for club meetings we’ve been back in person (or always were there) for a year or more now.
Fellow DTM Ken Krawchuk put together an award-winning speech titled “I HATE ZOOM!” I encourage you to watch the Zoom recording (at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwQVLCdLvmA) he prepared and join the conversation. Here are some food-for-thought questions:
Is Zoom something that you were grateful for when it was needed, then cast off with a sigh of relief once the need went away?
Did your club get hooked on Zoom, now finding itself unable to “kick the habit?”
Does an online meeting format, when not truly needed, benefit us, or does it contribute to laziness, in that members can sit at home in their skivvies? Are we better or worse off as Toastmasters when we shun the in-person meeting at which we can enjoy being social, better display body language, and use stage space, and receive continual audible and visual feedback from the audience, rather than staring at a bunch of video squares with everybody muted? Gack!
Is it just me, or can you also say, ‘I hate Zoom’?
Zoom did make me a much more dynamic presenter. Because I was unable to gauge the audience’s response using zoom I had to constantly generate energy to keep the sessions moving forward. Zoom meetings were exhausting. Laziness would not be a word I would ever associate with zoom meetings.
By lazy I did not mean inactive. I consider it lazy on a member’s part if he chooses to, given a choice, stay glued to his at-home chair rather than get to the in-person meeting like he used to. I have seen this exemplified via hybrid meetings, where the members used to attend, but now opt to, IMO, be lazy and participate from the casa. Sigh.