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Deep Zoom Lessons to Make Your Virtual Life Better
We’ve all gotten to know video conferencing a whole lot better lately, and for most of us that means spending a good deal of our working days on Zoom (or something like it). Indeed, I’ve been hearing from many people about a new phenom: Zoom fatigue.
There have been many well-intended pieces offering newbies help for these video meetings conducted from a makeshift office in your home. Frankly, many of those articles and Internet lists have made me cross because, while well-intentioned, they are not very helpful. They only deal with the most obvious and simple kinds of issues and answers. Yes, you should avoid having crying infants, barking dogs, and significant others dressed in pajamas wandering past your screen, if you can. If you can’t, then just embrace it. Yes, if you’re meeting from the laundry room, you probably should at least put the dirty laundry somewhere out of sight. And so on. Do we really need to be told this sort of thing?
The real issues that you should be paying attention to have to do with proprioception, and the stress response your unconscious mind has to watching people on a video screen who appear to be too close to you, as well as the slight asynchrony between the sound and sight that causes us to think the other person is having a stroke — even if consciously we’re not aware of these things.
