I do not remember the teacher’s name, nor much else that happened in 1985, but one part of my eighth-grade social studies class that remains vivid to my mind are the occasional “fun days” we were granted, when, instead of learning new material, we played a game called “News Quiz”. With impressive spirit, our teacher adopted the persona of a game-show host, reading from cards questions about arms-reduction treaty negotiations, and the economic consequences of the introduction of New Coke. Most of the questions are lost to my memory, but one of them has stuck with me: “What song has brought Queen of Soul Aretha Franklin back to the top of the charts?” And the answer was that long-forgotten eighties synth gem, “Who’s Zoomin’ Who?”
To ask who is Zooming whom, today, would mean something quite different. In Aretha’s sense, to “zoom” someone is to check them out with the intention of assaying their attractiveness – yet something about the question seemed to anticipate the inanity that would become our general condition in the era of perpetual social media connectedness. My 13-year-old mind could not fail to detect something spurious about this mixture of registers, of nuclear weapons and Top-40 hits, a mixture concocted on the presumption that these and many other things all belong to the category of “news”, and that it is our civic duty to remain familiar with them.
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