The Covid lockdowns brought us face to face with our own doppelgangers – via Zoom.
In my last post, EVIL Takes on the Gothic Doppelganger, I discuss the Doppelganger Trope in Gothic fiction and take a deeper dive into an episode of EVIL that leverages the trope. This got me thinking about what I would feel like to meet my own double.
And then it hit me: I already have – sort of. You likely met yours the same way, all courtesy of the Covid-19 lockdowns. In 2020, I was employed as a software engineer. When we went remote, the company quickly adopted Zoom as the primary communication mechanism for meetings and happy hours (which were honestly a bit odd, and I avoided attending them). The little squares populated with the faces of my coworkers became commonplace. Thanks to lockdown, I know about the messiness of a person’s home, if they are bald, and how huge their fingers look if they type on a laptop where the camera is at the bottom edge of the screen. I also know how I look – from the outside, as a moving, talking person.
It was uncomfortable and distracting to see myself “from the outside.” This was far different from a picture, a mirror, or even a video recording because it was real-time me speaking and real-time me drinking coffee, adjusting my glasses, and participating in the biannual “spill water all over my desk” event. There is nothing that could prepare me for seeing how mobile my face is. It was fascinating and horrifying. “Do I REALLY look like that?” “Why didn’t anyone TELL ME my mouth is crooked when I say certain words?” “What in the good-green-goddess is my hair DOING?” Although you can disable the view of yourself, I could never bring myself to do that. I was fascinated by my virtual doppelganger, with the wildly expressive hand motions and the inability to mask irritation, laughter, or dismay. I am a field-day for people with low emotional intelligence: there’s no difficulty determining my mood. I never knew that about me until I came face to face with my doppelganger.
Scientifically, part of the initial uncanniness of Zoom meetings is that by default, the video is not mirrored. This means that instead of seeing myself as I do in the mirror (which is reversed by the mirroring), I was seeing myself… as other people see me. In a sense, I was having a visual sensory experience of me as a different person, a separate individual that looked like me but was not “me.” I cut down the creepy factor by enabling the Zoom has option to mirror my video. Please note: this feature did nothing to prevent my doppelganger from spilling water on her desk.
Over time, I became accustomed to my double. She never faded into the background entirely but became just another person in a square, attending the meeting. For all her goofy expressions and waving hands, my Doppelganger really knew her stuff!
Erzsebet Carmean 