For Room Rater fans – the back story

Are you an avid reader of the Room Rater Twitter account which scores what’s seen behind people in Zoom meetings, during video calls, etc.  Emma Goldberg (“You’re Still on Mute,” 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/19/business/wfh-setups-rto.html) interviews one of its creators, Claude Taylor.

We’ve all been “room rating” other people’s homes for a while now—we know that those backgrounds provide clues into what’s important to whomever we’re talking with and we’re interested in what they have to “say.”  We’ve talked about the psychological importance of decorating/personalizing the spaces you spend time in to send messages about yourself that you feel are positive several times, for example here.

Goldberg reports that “There was a moment in April 2020 when hand sanitizer was scarce, time was plentiful and perhaps to distract from the fear and uncertainty of a raging pandemic, those who were lucky enough to be stuck at home took pleasure in judging the homes of others, who were also stuck. Mr. Taylor and his friend Jessie Bahrey started posting their judgments on Twitter. Celebrities scrambled for better Room Rater scores, outfitting their homes with plants, posters and the obligatory copy of Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker.” ‘Within months, people that we were rating as twos and threes were becoming eights, nines and 10s,’ said Mr. Taylor, who has written a book with Ms. Bahrey called “How to Zoom Your Room,” released in July 2022. ‘People have cleaned up their act quite a bit. Of course, we take some degree of credit for that.’”