Opinion, Point vs. Counterpoint

PCPCPCPCPCPCP: Everyone’s Talking About Zoom

Other sides of this Point-Counterpoint:

When I first arrived back in Toronto after leaving Waterloo, there was one glaring difference between my university experience and my home life: family dinners. And, due to the sudden change of online school and working from home, family dinners would often be a place of debate over the best online meeting platform. That’s right, I’m talking about Zoom. I know what some of you are thinking. ‘Zoom? Really?’ While it may not appear to be the most glamourous of platforms or you believe it to be too mainstream nowadays, its stock market values are going up for a reason.

One thing I discovered while I was using Zoom during the winter term was that only one person needs to download it for you to host a meeting. Not only is it cross-platform, but it also considers the common problem of never having enough storage space on your computer. We’ve all been there. You’re trying to download literally anything and your computer continuously tells you that you have no space left on your laptop. You spend the next hour scouring all of your files, deleting anything and everything that you had no use for anymore. Those pictures from your grade 8 graduation? Gone. That essay you wrote back in grade 10 English? Gone. You bravely click the download link one more time and somehow, you still don’t have enough space. With Zoom, that problem disappears. So long as you have one friend with 11.4 MB of storage on their computer, you’re set.

Speaking of friends, Zoom let’s you host calls with up to 100 people in the same call. This means that it’s great for weekly video chats with your extended family, online movie nights with your closest friends or a late one-on-one gab session with your bestie. Most importantly, it finally let’s you live out that dream everyone else told you was impossible. You finally have the opportunity to have that quick catching up with your top 100 Facebook friends all at the same time. Really, it’s a dream come true.

Of course, with all of those people, you may not want to stay on the call for an extremely long time. Zoom has a solution for that. While some may say that having a 40-minute cut off time for video calls is a negative thing, I have to argue otherwise. Imagine every family event you want to get out of, every awkward conversation that you don’t know how to continue and every never-ending business meeting you’ve sat in. You don’t have to worry about those anymore. You have the handy excuse of telling your crazy aunt Sally that the meeting time is about to run out and you’ll talk to her next week. And next week? Just use that exact same excuse.

One more great thing about Zoom is its chat feature. A lot of video calling platforms have chat features that are difficult to use. They get hidden while you’re on the call or they take away the call to pull up the chat. Meanwhile, Zoom’s feature is clearly visible on the right side of the video and a clearly marked button to open and close the chat. Plus, you have the option to chat with your friends individually in the middle of a call. Rather than having to pull out your phone and send your friend a text or vaguely subtweeting about the ridiculous thing someone said, you can select one of your friends and choose the private chat option. You can talk about your friends behind their backs right in front of their faces.

So put your faith in the best video calling platform around and start calling today.

1 Comment

  1. rmajeed

    Love this! really funny

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