Zoomology might be defined as the study of suggested human performance in such matters as education and business. It’s not real. Its specific activity, Zooming, doesn’t manage to accomplish much beyond freeing its users, exiled from classroom or office, from the guilt that they aren’t getting stuff done.

This is not to say that the 2013 debut of Zoom, a video conferencing service founded by California techie Eric Yuan, wasn’t a bright idea. Nor that the sudden, massive nationwide adoption of Zoom in March wasn’t a timely response to shelter-in-place orders necessitated by the modern plague. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

There are reports that Zoom parties and Zoom visits with socially distanced family and friends provide a decided comfort while we all are on Coronavirus Standard Time. But arguments exist that telephone calls are more personal. And, according to technology mavens, Zoom has privacy and security issues which should concern us.

Generally speaking, a two-month immersion in Zoomology reveals that, mostly, Zoom’s without-a-body experience can’t possibly substitute in-person discussion and brainstorming.

For one thing, the format is visually disconcerting, those rows of faces-in-boxes that recall, to us folks of a certain age and questionable television habits, the long-ago Brady Bunch intro or Hollywood Squares game show. As a Wall Street Journal headline noted in describing the potential exhaustion of meeting via Zoom, “Being gazed at by giant heads can take a mental toll.”

In place of back-and-forth communication involving physical presence, the remoteness of Zoom produces distractions in the form of participants’ absent-minded Z-gr-ooming—checking their hair in their Zoom cameras. Or, in contrast to that, those college students—technically present for online instruction—whose involvement can be better described as Zzzzzzzooming, their eyelids drooping while they lie in bed.

That is, if they haven’t opted for the no-camera look in which they are represented by a blank, black square.

Then you have the instances of Zoom-looming—children, cats or dogs wandering in and out of the process. Or some folks’ attention-deficit inclination to nose around a co-worker’s living quarters, possibly making judgments about the wallpaper, kitchen fixtures or garage-like environment. The New York Times recently zoomed in (lower-case ‘z’) on the bookshelves of celebrities during quarantine interviews—including Prince Charles, Stacey Abrams and Cate Blanchett—to wonder what certain tomes, spied in the background, might reveal about them.

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld, in a Times interview, dismissed the inclination toward that sort of snooping, insisting, “I don’t want to see how you really live. We’re all just sick of people’s houses.”

More likely, we’re just sick of the circumstances that require another Zoomsday. In an essay for the online platform Medium, Kelli Maria Korducki pointed out that “we’ve reached the irritation phase of this pandemic.”

My own experience, since being thrown the Zoom lifeline to continue conducting a college sportswriting class, is that online sessions feel increasingly detached from sports, writing and anything resembling a class. After seven weeks of this, a Zoom fatigue—Zoom-and-gloom—clearly has set in.

And it’s doubtful that one alternative to real-time video contact, the so-called “asynchronous” Zoom meeting, isn’t worse, because that consists of recording all the previously mentioned shortcomings for later viewing. Which guarantees even less human interaction. It sounds like, and is akin to, remaining asymptomatic while carrying a Zoom virus.

So here we are: The breakneck increase of Zoom’s daily use—up from roughly 10 million people in December to around 300 million now—is replicating the galloping Covid-19 spread. Maybe we couldn’t get along without it, given the social distancing trap visited upon us all.

That doesn’t make the desire for a Zoom vaccine any less urgent.