Queen Elizabeth II uses Zoom to talk to the Australians Of The Year

Article

Queen Elizabeth II tells the 2022 Australians of the Year they’re doing ‘marvelous work’ in Zoom interview – ABC News

‘Cheeky’ Queen jokes as she congratulates Australians of the Year | Queen’s platinum jubilee | The Guardian

Daily Telegraph Video – Click or tap to play on YouTube

 

My Comments

As part of her Platinum Jubilee celebrations, Queen Elizabeth II placed a Zoom videocall to Australia to talk to this year’s Australians Of The Year.

Here, she had called Government House in Australia where the Governor-General was with Shanna Whan, Dylan Alcott, David Hurley, Linda Hurley, Valmai Dempsey and Dr Daniel Nour with Dylan Alcott, the retired wheelchair tennis player who won the Golden Slam, making a cheeky remark to the Queen to liven up the conversation.

But this shows that Queen Elizabeth II is no stranger to new communications technologies that came forth through her reign.

She was the first monarch to broadcast the annual Christmas Message to the Commonwealth by television and, subsequently, the Internet. These messages were broadcast using the ever-evolving and increasingly ubiquitous TV technologies like the 625-line technology that was sharper than the original 405-line technology, colour TV, satellite broadcasting and digital TV.

In 1958, Her Majesty placed the first direct-dial long-distance telephone call in the UK by placing a call from Bristol to the Lord Provost at Edinburgh. She celebrated this technology’s 50th anniversary in 2008 by making a videocall between the same locations using Skype and the Internet.

As well in 2004, she knighted Sir Tim Berners-Lee who is the inventor of the World Wide Web which made the Internet what it is able to do today.

This Zoom call effectively synthesised television, the self-dial long-distance phone call and the World Wide Web together as a single instance that linked the UK to Australia in a visual manner.

It is effectively summing up Her Majesty’s long reign that has been underscored with many different communications technologies coming to fruition through that time.

Leave a Reply