Zoom meetings – in touch but out of synch
You can’t look someone in the eye on Zoom. And yet at the same time, all eyes are continuously on you – arrayed in a gallery like a low resolution University Challenge team. Worse, among that gallery, delayed by the same millisecond lag, is a video of yourself.
Is it any wonder, then, that people find telemeeting more socially exhausting than real meeting?
Of all the phrases that have entered common usage since the pandemic arrived, none sums up the peculiarly 21stcentury nature of our quarantine better than ‘‘Zoom fatigue’’.
Technology has been our saviour during lockdown, yet in the back-to-back teleconferencing followed by back-to-back telesocialising we have found we are missing more than just touch.
Professor Jeremy Bailenson, who researches the psychology of teleconferencing at Stanford University, says he is not surprised by Zoom fatigue. ‘‘What we’re seeing is the challenges of synchrony, and also the exhaustion that comes from eye contact,’’ he says.
The eye contact issue is the exact opposite of the problem his fellow researchers, predicting a future where everyone teleconferenced, thought we would experience. ‘‘For a long time people have been trying to solve the problem that you can look up at the camera or I can look up, but we can’t see each other’s eyes at the same time.’’
This meant you could never precisely align – you could never gaze deeply into the eyes of your telelove. ‘‘Then we realised there was the other eye contact problem.’’
This problem is, bluntly, that most people aren’t teleloves, and in a group meeting there are a lot of people looking at you a bit too much. ‘‘It is bathing you in eye contact,’’ says Bailenson, who has written about the perils of virtual worlds in his book Experience on Demand.
In an ordinary meeting, in contrast, research shows it is rare that people look at each other, and there is good reason for this. ‘‘Humans have learnt that if somebody gets really close to you and is staring you in the eye, one of two things can happen. You’re about to get in a fight, or there’s going to be an amorous situation,’’ he says. Neither situation wholly accords with a 9am accounts meeting.
On top of this, all the time you are also seeing yourself. This is an extra factor that, according to Martin Graff, senior lecturer in psychology at the University of South Wales, can make us hyperconscious of how we look. ‘‘It’s a bit like holding a conversation while looking in the mirror constantly.’’
Yet the biggest cause of fatigue might be in what Zoom does not show, rather than what it does. A millisecond does not feel like much, but it is enough of a delay that the normal social cues that govern the rhythm of conversation, that enable windbags to be politely interrupted and the more timorous introverts to find their voices, are completely disrupted.
Studies in the 1960s looked at the nonverbal behaviour of people in conversations. Using high-speed film they recorded every movement and shuffle. They found an astonishing synchrony. ‘‘The body of the speaker,’’ the researchers wrote, ‘‘dances in time with his speech. Further, the body of the listener dances in rhythm with that of the speaker.’’
Trying to pull off that kind of synchrony over an internet connection and showing just a portion of your body would, says Bailenson, be as pointless as trying to sing a duet over the same connection. The result is that we are all, instead, out of synch. ‘‘We have gestures that facilitate turn-taking – subtle things like posture, glances. All are lost.’’
Faced with all of these problems, though, it might just be that technology has a solution. Bailenson is working on a project that he calls an ‘‘autopilot’’ for Zoom. It grabs footage of you listening attentively and puts it on loop.
‘‘If you are in a big meeting you just hit a button and then . . .’’ On the teleconference screen, Bailenson sits nodding, mutely but sagely. He may have alighted on the ultimate solution to Zoom fatigue.