Zoom fatigue: the reasons that try to explain it

For decades, academics have predicted that Video conferencing technology will disrupt commuting and change the way people socialize. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a drastic increase in the number of videoconference meetings. While software has been an essential tool for productivity, learning and social interaction, being on videoconferencing all day seems particularly exhausting, and the concept of “Zoom Fatigue” quickly became popular.

“My analysis indicates Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of Stanford University Virtual Human Interaction Laboratory, author of a recent research-, focuses on non-verbal overload as a possible cause of fatigue and how various aspects of the current Zoom interface are likely to have psychological consequences. Instead of blaming the environment, the goal is to identify these design flaws in order to isolate areas of research for social science researchers and to suggest design improvements for technologists.

In 2020, videoconferencing was a fundamental tool that has allowed schools and many businesses to continue working. Various platforms have helped millions of people by making video conferencing free and easy to use. Additionally, if the practice of attending meetings persists after the pandemic, fossil fuel consumption is expected to decline due to reduced physical travel. For example, one study showed that video conferencing uses less than 10% of the energy required for an in-person meeting.

While there are dozens of empirical studies in psychology, human-machine interaction, and communication that examine behavior during video conferencing, Rigorous studies examining the psychological consequences of spending hours a day in this particular environment have yet to be conducted..

“Unlike talking about videoconferencing in general,” explains the author, “I focus on Zoom in particular. I am a frequent user of this tool and am grateful for the product which has helped my research group stay productive and keep my friends and family connected. But, since it has become the default platform for many academics, It makes sense to focus on him, which has grown from around 10 million users in December 2019 to over 300 million users five months later. In addition, the omnipresence of software has led to the appearance of credits, and many use the word “Zoom” as a verb to replace videoconferencing. “

Early research on non-verbal behavior documented the compromise between gaze and interpersonal distance. The research replicated these results with virtual faces, in that people will give more interpersonal distance when approaching virtual humans who maintain a virtual gaze compared to those who are not.

At Zoom, behavior normally reserved for intimate relationships, such as long periods of direct gaze and faces seen up close It’s suddenly become the way you interact with casual acquaintances, colleagues, and even strangers. There are two components: the size of the faces on the screen and the length of time the viewer looks at the front view of someone else’s face which simulates eye contact.

“The size of faces on a screen,” he said Bailenson– it will depend on the size of the computer screen, the distance you sit from the monitor, the display settings you choose in Zoom and the number of faces in the grid. In individual meetings conducted via Zoom, colleagues and friends maintain an interpersonal distance reserved for their relatives ”.

Similar calculations have been made with group interactions in research, and although these measures remain informal, this pattern does not appear to change as group size increases. In zoom grids, faces have a wider field of view than face to face when considering how groups are naturally spaced in physical conference rooms..

“Anyone who speaks for a living understands the intensity of being watched for hours,” says the specialist.

In the face to face interaction, non-verbal communication flows naturally, to the point where Gestures and other non-verbal signals rarely receive conscious attention. In Zoom, nonverbal behavior is still complex, but users have to work harder to send and receive signals.

During a video call, users are forced to consciously monitor non-verbal behaviors and send signals to others that are generated intentionally. Los ejemplos incluyen centrarse en el campo de visión de la cámara, asentir de manera exagerada durante unos segundos más para indicar que está de acuerdo o mirar directamente a la cámara (en lugar de las caras en la pantalla) para intentar hacer contacto visual directo al speak. Zooming allows people to sort of reduce the amount of surveillance; for example, people do not have to worry about leg movements since they are not facing the camera.

Another point concerns signal reception. In a face to face conversation People derive great significance from head and eye movements, which help signal change of shift, agreement, and a host of emotional cues. What happens when these signals are present and perceived by other talkers but not related to the intention of the person making the gesture?

In many ways, in a video call, the look is perceptually realistic, but not socially realistic. “Evaluated users increased gaze condition with lower levels of social presence -indicates the professor-. For example, the participants did not feel ‘in tune’ with the speakers and did not think that the interaction was fluid ”.

Zoom users often experience this disconnection. For example, in a face-to-face meeting, a quick glance to the side in which one person is looking at another has social significance, Yes a third person observing this exchange probably encodes this meaning. In Zoom, a user can see a model in which on his grid it appears that one person is looking at another. However, this is not what actually happened, because people often do not have the same networks. Even if the grids were kept constant, the viewer was much more likely to have received a calendar reminder on their screen or a chat message.. Users are constantly receiving non-verbal cues that would have specific meaning in a face-to-face context, but which have different meanings in Zoom.

“If we had to count the similarities between the two, they would far outweigh the differences,” he warns. Bailenson-. In fact, the success of this medium, like many technologies, revolves around his ability to perfectly mimic face-to-face conversations. In addition, regardless of the medium, it is important to recognize that meetings in general can be quite exhausting, as well as movement from one place to another, which Zoom eliminates. Maybe a Zoom fatigue factor is simply that we attend more meetings than we would face to face“.

For decades, academics have predicted that communication technology will disrupt the practice of going and returning to work ten times a week. Even when face-to-face meetings are safe again, there’s a good chance the culture has finally changed enough to remove some of the stigma that was previously opposed to virtual meetings.

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