Much to ponder in this excerpt from a new book called ‘Your Stone Age Brain in the Screen Age’ by Richard E. Cytowic:
Only a few months into 2020, “Zoom fatigue” became a discussion topic. Most complaints were about sound or video dropping out because of poor connectivity. But video callers speak about 15 percent louder than they do in person, need effort to focus and shift attention while looking on-screen at a dozen or more participants, and must constantly gauge whether they are coming across as engaged. All this requires extra emotional effort compared to face-to-face conversation. As a result, virtual meetings went from novelty to a source of exhaustion.
The cognitive load of online meetings eats up your capacity to think, too. When face-to-face we process a slew of signals without having to consciously think about them: facial expression, gesture, posture, vocal tone and rhythm, and the distance between speakers. We read body language and make emotional judgments about whether others are credible or not. This is easy to do in person, whereas video chats force us to work to glean the same cues. This consumes a lot of energy.
Interesting reflection on ‘mirror anxiety’ too, with the suggestion of having more audio only calls:
The mental strain of having to look at oneself over hours of Zoom meetings results in what Stanford University psychologists call “mirror anxiety,” while “Zoom dysmorphia” describes a user’s anxiety about dark circles, wrinkles, or bad hair. From a sample of 10,322 subjects, 14 percent of women felt “very” or “extremely” fatigued after Zoom calls, compared to only 6 percent of men. The researchers devised a Zoom and Exhaustion Fatigue scale to assess how serious the problem felt across five dimensions of fatigue: general, social, emotional, visual, and motivational (readers can test how susceptible they are at bit.ly/332zRaS). In addition to mirror anxiety, more women than men felt trapped: they took fewer breaks and felt obligated to hover within the camera’s frame. Established research tells us that looking in a mirror raises self-consciousness and self-criticism about one’s appearance. In what sounds like a good idea, researchers suggest making some meetings audio-only as a way to “reduce the psychological costs, especially given that these costs are born unequally across society.”
