A theory of Zoom fatigue
theconvivialsociety.substack.com
theconvivialsociety.substack.com
Even in the early cellphone days, I'd often prefer using my landline. There was less lag. Cellphones felt like speakerphones where it tries to do that cancellation stuff and you feel like the conversation is split into pieces .. like a walkie-talkie where you don't control the "over" / button press.
Cellphones have gotten better, but they've never really hit the latency of landlines (or maybe they have and I didn't notice. I never actually talk to people on my phone any more). Video conferencing like that that but worse. It's really apparent if you're on a remote team and you're next to someone on the same call. You can hear that delay.
I like a lot of the fatigue comes from that delay. We can connect more people now, with video, over great distances, but it does come at a cost at moving from virtual dedicated circuits to package switches networks and transcoding on some central server.
It's a lot to process. With 15 people on "speakerphone", the audio is IMO the biggest and most taxing problem.
I do a number of actual play games and it's the players trying to use the built in mics/headphones that have difficulty hearing the group conversations.
I use a high quality external sound card and don't have that problem - hangouts does seem to disconnect me when I don't speak for a while as my noise floor is so low
FWIW I say please & thank you too, and am opted-in to "Improve Siri" which Apple really ought to known to make opt-in from the start.
I also have type-to-Siri (in accessibility settings) for things like "What's playing?".
Siri is the like the Apple Maps of voice assistants.
Alexa (at least Echo gen 3) doesn't have this delay. I can talk with Alexa without getting frustrated at the latency. (unfortunately Alexa doesn't handle pauses or stumbles in sentences well)
We've had it for so long now with digital cell phone calls, even HD calling, certainly Zoom et al (some are particularly aggressive on the noise gate when others are speaking over you).
I have equally clear memories of my first overseas calls carried by undersea fiber because the lack of latency was so pronounced compared to what I had become accustomed to by then.
I still can barely tolerate carrying on a conversation on a cell phone though. The latency and compression artifacts are just horrible compared to a landline. VOIP has gotten pretty good though. I can't tell the difference between a good VOIP landline and a POTS line.
You: Copy.
All landlines now get digitised and packetized, and usually go over an IP network, frequently via the landline companies HQ hundreds of miles away, before heading back to your neighbours house who you were calling...
Data is the same - If I ping my next door neighbor, from my broadband connection to his, it goes via London (my ISP's headquarters) and Manchester (his ISP's headquarters) before coming back to him, with a round trip latency of >20ms. In sound terms, that delay is like him standing in the next room over.
I feel like that would be enough to be basically perfect, though. If only we could cut down on everything else in the chain adding its own latency.
That constant delay, plus the worse ones when the connection loses strength, put a constant toll on "zoom" conversations.
I think that is the main factor but many of the items they brought up in the article also add to it but my guess is if there were no delay or drop in quality, it would be very manageable.
I feel like microsoft is still cluseless, looking at bing analytics and thinking millions of people search for "notepad" every day because they really think its a great thing to research?
Zoom does not (at least AFAIK), so I have no way to judge if I’m speaking at an appropriate volume.
- The headsets were comfortable and practical. I have not seen anything sold for office or even gaming use begin to approach the ergonomics. Plantronic, Logitech, none of it.
- Every headset had foldback, so even the big sound-isolating cans felt natural to speak into. I've spent several hours messing with virtual sound cards trying to make this work with Zoom and never managed it.
- The signal was so clear, and the mics were so good, that as long as you enunciated you could speak just a hair above a whisper and be reliably understood. I remember analog PSTN voice, and this was 10x better. Might have to do with less aggressive EQ.
- Full duplex, no gating. Absolutely no problem with multiple people speaking at the same time. At very busy parts of the show we might intentionally have two simultaneous interactions on the same channel. It was a bit of work to unpack in your brain, but no harder than it would have been in person.
- Obviously no noticeable latency (basic fitness for purpose - these things are for calling cues).
- There was a little bit of analog hum + background noise from each station, so when someone opened their mic you would notice, but it wasn't disruptive. When the channel was busy, this sort of substituted for body language and you'd be invited to speak at the first opportunity.
- Physical switch to open and close the mic. I know Zoom has spacebar PTT, but one button press latch on/off is also important.
It's absolutely astounding to me just how much better these systems are than their nearest alternatives 30+ years later. If I ever control a tech office, particularly with an operations component, I'll seriously consider installing one.
The reason is very similar to landlines. A dedicated board in each station that shares three copper lines with every other station. In this scenario you cannot beat analogue.
The ease of setup is also fantastic. All you need is some XLR cables. At some point on the line you need a power supply, which usually acts as a signal splitter so you can have lines going in different directions. Then just plug everything together.
FWIW, what you're describing is achievable with a decent audio interface, something like the AT BPHS1/BPHS2, and some cough/mute switches. My travel rig for video has full direct monitoring/sidetone for up to eight microphones/headsets, including wireless transmitters if I need to go that route; it's fantastic.
The current state of affairs for normal people is as bad as it is because normal people don't care.
OTOH everyone on a Web video chat always sounds like they're YELLING. Even if the volume's turned down, the tone registers as yelling. Having those happening nearby with regularity, even behind a (thin) wall, is about as bad as the proverbial open-office-seated-near-sales situation.
I think people talk louder on cell phones than they did on old analog land lines, too.
I have an external USB microphone from Schure that has an integrated 3.5mm headphone jack and mic volume dial. It mixes the sound of your own voice and the line-out from your computer, just like landline phones do. You might want to give it a try.
No modern system allows that. Some old ones (analogue TV) did.
- yes lag, having to deal with delays and jump in at the right time is fatiguing
- audio - auto-muting, inexact codecs, compression artifacts, bad echo cancellation
- small screen, and mismatched eyes
- there is also etiquette.
inadvertent - people who talk too loud or don't understand the lag or don't notice their drop outs
should-know-better - people who use speakerphone and inflict it on people who deal with headsets to give others good sound. or carry their devices moving
To be fair, this varies by speakerphone. I use a landline phone with a high quality speakerphone. As far as I've been told, the quality is as good as possible (limited by the line I'm dialing into).
With Zoom, Facetime etc, it's hard to gauge who's talking to who. Side conversations within groups are impossible. You also can't get a feel over another person's body language.
Lag is generally not noticeable on cellphones, and lag has always been a problem with landlines on long-distance (especially far-international) calls.
What you're describing "like a walkie-talkie" is actually the difference between half-duplex and full-duplex.
Landlines are full-duplex, and cell phones were notoriously bad half-duplex... until 4G which is considered full-duplex. There's also the issue of carriers muting audio completely when it's under a certain threshold, which makes them less responsive, because you have to ask "are you there?" every so often.
Videoconferencing latency is a separate issue, because there's one central server for each meeting, so if it's between the NY and SF office, the server may be in SF, so two separate NY participants get double the latency talking to each other than they do talking to SF. But, everybody hears the same audio.
You might say, well why don't they select a server in the middle of the country for that call then? But selecting an optimal server location for a videoconferencing call is difficult, even if you have access to cloud locations all over the country/world, because you usually don't know in advance who's going to join the call. So whoever hosts the call or whoever's the first participant, the server is often chosen to simply be whichever one is closest to them, which can sometimes be quite suboptimal once everyone's joined. (And I sure wouldn't want to be the one to write code for switching servers mid-call.)
Also, videoconferencing is much closer to "half-duplex" because if you were always mixing everyone's audio together, it would be a noisy mess.
But in conclusion -- latency/delay isn't a significant new problem that digital networks have introduced. It's always been there, but duplex, silence thresholds, and conference calls are the more important factors to pay attention to.
They weren't always, except for local calls. My Background: I made a lot overseas phone calls in the 1980's to talk to my father, from North America to Japan. I also took a telecom class going through uni.
When calling Japan, not only was it crazy expensive, but the connection was typically terrible. We considered it amazing to be calling Japan at all, so that was ok. Issues:
1. Latency, just start talking when the ringing stops. If you wait to hear the person say "hello" they'd generally hang up before they heard you. Sometimes it would be around 5s latency, we always said this must be "satellite" connections vs using undersea cables.
2. Voice quality. You could hear and recognize the person on the far side, but that's about it.
3. Cost. I don't remember the cost exactly since I was young, but I remember it was between $2-$5/min in 1980's dollars. Calls were short.
Latency was a major focus of telecom networks for a couple of reasons. One was human, obviously humans really prefer low latency in telecom networks. Good old school POTS lines also have to sidetone[1] the old fashioned way, and if the round trip time gets too high it's really disruptive to hear your own voice > 300ms later. But this causes a big echo problem, so have a shorter round trip time makes the echo cancellation filters shorter/easier.
1) Sidetone is hearing your own voice come out of the speaker. Analog POTS lines are super cool this way, on longer connections the signal is weaker so the sidetone is weaker, so the human speaks louder. This means their own voice is louder so the person at the far end can hear them over the weaker signal.
When I went back to South Korea in 1994 I was able to telnet into compuserve from on base, and then email back home.
* You can't have a normal conversation with that much delay. Every time you talk you're probably interrupting someone, and that starts to wear on you.
* You can't have any side chats with your neighbors before and after the meeting, making everyone seem less like a person.
* You can't tell who's looking at you, so you always feel like you have to remain presentable and vigilant.
* There's no sense of space. You can't look over at person if whomever is talking just teleports to the center of the screen. Or if the layout is fixed, sound isn't coming from anywhere in particular, so you need to search around for who's talking. And everyone on screen is looking a random direction.
I can see the benefits of a screen share/presentation, but I really don't need to see the other people involved. I don't care about tone of voice. I get sarcasm. For the people that don't, then even if they can see them, the sarcasm isn't more/less because it's a video call.
Video calls to me are just another version of "Hey look at me!!!! I'm special"
Secondarily, I have a much better time assessing whether other attendees are following a conversation. If I'm feeling lost, but everyone else looks like they're following along, maybe it's just me — and I'll sit tight and try to catch up. If others look bewildered, I'll start asking questions.
You have the possibility of using an actual raised hand to signal that you want to interrupt a discussion that has gone astray. But that only works in settings where all participants are visible even when silent.
This isn't true for everyone, but certainly is for many.
I still find a video call more draining than physical interaction, but in the absence of the latter I'll take this in order to visit with our friends. We have a standing Friday happy hour with 2 other couples we used to see "in real life" all the time, and we look forward to it. My cycling group has taken to setting up "training Zooms" we can join so we can all suffer together on our indoor trainers, and that's nice, too.
What's interesting to me is that, now that video calling is becoming more mainstream, I wonder how much of it will stay after Corona, and how that will affect long-distance friendships.
I’ve wondered about this - why aren’t individual speakers (people) each placed somewhere different on the stereo plane? Is it because the video is in front of us and having people sound like there coming from the sides could be distracting, by drawing our attention away from the screen?
It must have been tried - why doesn’t it work?
If you want to google more, the term generically is 'positional audio'. Dolby calls theirs 'Voice Placement'.
1: https://www.dolby.com/us/en/professional/products/dolby-voic... (ctrl-f for 'voice placement')
2: https://www.bluejeans.com/products/rooms/dolby-voice-confere...
Feel free to hit that "Turn off Video" button from time to time. I make liberal use of it.
For mass adoption the headsets would have to become even more comfortable and lightweight, the displays faster and higher resolution, with lower price and easier setup.
I haven't followed the latest developments, so we might be a couple of generations away from this, assuming the industry can keep progressing during downtime.
The big downside is the friction of getting it set up. Inevitably someone has a dead battery or their VR setup decides it absolutely needs to update drivers for the Nth time this week, and then everyone is waiting or unsure what is going on.
The things I like: - having the range of activity during a meeting constrained to one area in front of me so I don't have to look around the room to make sure I'm not missing something / get overstimulated by too much stuff happening. - Boxes with borders lighting up when someone is making noise / talking so I know where to look. - Names always associated with faces - text chat area for sharing links and non-disruptive ways to request clarification - No longer get lost in the hallway trying to find rooms with weird names - Don't have to kick people out of rooms when they stay too long - can foot tap and fidget hands off screen without people noticing
Also if everyone is on different timezones please don't make us turn on webcams. I'm getting a lot of 7-8am meetings lately now that my team is mostly East of me. I'm just waking up. I was in meetings from 8am this morning. I showered at 2pm when I finally got a 30 minute break.
Maybe I'm just too much in my own head about it, but it seems there's a bit of a performative element to zoom meetings making me a lot more award of presentation and perception than in irl meetings.
I'm no Zoom apologist, but.. it has a 'raise hand' emoji/action, as well as a topic queue (in Q&A format). it also has "go faster" and "go slower" feedback attendees can display to the presenter in realtime.
I like the talking stick^W ball idea, though.
Lots of this stuff is in off-by-default preferences in Zoom, FYI.
https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115001286183-Nonve...
Ha! We must work in the same office. See you at 3:00pm in Redwood - oh wait!, sorry, moved to Edgemar - tomorrow.
And by introvert, I mean I can very confidently conduct meetings, conversations and socialise well, but it wears me down.
I find phone calls and video meetings somewhat more exhausting minute by minute.
So much so that I tend to have much shorter phone calls and video meetings. I cant go more than about 30 minutes before I have to stop.
Some people in my office however can seemingly go for hours! Literally 2 to 3 hours of a phone/video meetings and they seem engaged and energised. They love talking!
For me, just give me the facts and lets move on to some actual work.
I also don't particularly notice any increased lag, perhaps I'm normally operating at a verbal or social lag and zoom normalizes it down to my level?
Also, can hide video and pace around without bothering people.
Not saying you're wrong (of course you're not, your experiences are not mine to judge), just providing a counter-anecdote.
Personally I don't really mind either way; with IRL meetings it varies, there's ones where I'm more an observer where I mainly tend to fall asleep, and there's the stand-ups which are fine outside of other people not in the meeting speaking up (we've had to shush them on more than one occasion). That last happened a few years ago though.
The alternative would be audio-only calls or text-based chat, or simply not communicating (not feasible for businesses but maybe for families/friends).
First, the audio processing takes a lot of my attention. This obviously depends on the call quality.
Second, RSD and feeling watched all the time. IRL, people are looking at the speaker, so I can scratch my nose in peace.
Third, after all those years of having ADHD, I've adapted to IRL meetings. Given enough time, I'll probably adapt to video calls as well.
Either I ask for repetition all the time (and walk over whatever the next person said), or I assume it from context and let it go.
Even when I can pick up all the sounds, it’s so different from hearing voice in person that I have to concentrate just to parse the audio into meaning. It’s exhausting.
Cell phone calls are still pretty bad, too. Low bandwidth digital audio compression is just wretched.
If anything, the fact that everyone has their own microphone makes it better than in person meetings, because you never have to struggle with that one person who doesn't talk loud enough for the entire table to hear (which is sometimes me, because I have a very soft voice and struggle to speak loudly in big meetings).
The other thing that would be nice is if Win10 hadn't hidden the microphone level/gain controls.
You're not paying Apple $1000 for a microphone on a stick when you buy an iPhone, you're buying a computer that has a tiny microphone that works well enough for most normal phone calls to your doctor or whichever. If you care about audio quality as a foremost feature, you do what business people have been doing for years and buy a wireless headset/in-ear with a directional mic that's built for comfort and tuned to pick up audio in the exact distance range of your ear to your mouth.
As for Apple in particular, it is worth pointing out they have a hard time getting laptop keyboards right, when keyboards in the general sense have been working fine for decades. They make tradeoffs for other values (thinness) and the product suffers as a result.
What is terrible is audio hardware on laptops. MacBooks are alright, but just $50 on a headset will go a long ways to solving your problems. Consumers haven't given a shit about audio fidelity for decades honestly, it's just showing today when you are listening to unprocessed audio streams that haven't been optimized for your laptop or phone's fundamentally inferior transducers.
This is a solved problem, for what it's worth. The major audio manufacturers sell products for these use cases. It's not the software at this point, it's actually decent. It's the input and output devices. Thank god for gamers buying these things and driving economies of scale.
Assuming that does solve it, I'd say a solution is known, but I wouldn't call it "solved". That's like a "nobody needs DropBox" type of "solved problem".
The technical problem is solved. The economics problem of getting people to value the solution and marketing problem of educating about it is still open.
Regardless, this isn't a problem to be solved by software. It's a consumer electronics problem.
Audio quality in Zoom itself is superb according to my experience. Webex is applying some heavy compression. Teams is closer to Zoom, but not as good.
And I would say the root cause is people not knowing how bad they sound. Others don't complain, because they don't want to spend time debugging one participants audio setup. It would help if all the conferencing tools would provide easy to use tools for testing your setup (record message, play it back). Maybe one could even offer (as an option) a forced audio check before you can join the meeting.
I thought that for a long time. And then, a colleague and I have a MBP 16, and poof, looks like descent quality speaker and microphone on a properly integrated sound stack does wonders even on standard software.
When considerable effort is put into deciphering what you (think) you hear beyond following the topic itself that is exhausting!
When I use good quality connection I can pay attention more to the meaning rather than the words spoken.
The original post and the comments here are interesting and intriguing, but many points raised here (a) assume that the initial proposition is in fact true, and (b) don't ask as to what evidence is available in support of the proposition (or indeed whether there is evidence that might appear to contradict it) beyond our own individual experience:
'Why is video-conferencing so exhausting?'
This is not to say that Zoom (etc.) isn't tiring to use, simply that it's sensible first to ask questions such as:
- is it particularly tiring to use? How do we know? - if Zoom etc. is particularly tiring, for what proportion of users is this the case? - are some types of users more affected than others? Why? - is fatigue related specifically to video (as opposed to audio) use? - is fatigue related to the number of concurrent users in a given call? - is all video-conferencing similarly tiring, or are some platforms more so than others, and if so, why? UI? Latency? Some other reason? - are Zoom meetings any more tiring than traditional face-to-face meetings? - etc.
And in fact I kinda like them better than regular meetings, because I can walk around the house and do whatever. But I also don't have a webcam requirement either, so maybe that's the difference for me.
They eventually setup wifi in their home, so we switched to VoIp calls, mainly so we wouldn’t block our families’ landlines for a couple hours every day. And the quality was so much worse...
The delay sometimes would be so bad that we had this technique where one would slowly count down from 3 and then say “Now”! Then when the other heard Now they’d say Now too, and the first person could essentially count the seconds. This way we could “slow down” our conversation to accomodate for the multi-second delay, which (thinking back) was like our own protocol for dealing with signal delay!
In the mid-2000s, I used Vonage (VoiP) from Japan to the US all the time. People were shocked because it sounded like I was right next to them. My grandmother actually thought I was bamboozling her by saying I was in Japan because she thought that there was no way it could be so clear.
Granted, I was usually dialing my VoiP on a blistering fast internet connection (not in Tokyo, to be fair) to a POTS line in the US, but the connection was amazing.
So I wonder how 10 years ago the VoiP-VoiP connection was so poor. Do you think it was basic internet speed (which the US has historically been behind other developed countries), or do you think it was something else?
For some it also helps knowing someone sees you. I don't mind if others don't share video, I set that bar for myself.
2. Avoiding interrupting one another- being able to see other people's faces means you can see when they're about to start speaking. That means you're less likely to talk over each other
3. Keeping focused- for me at least. If i'm on an audio only call i'm tempted to zone out or do some other work when other people are speaking and I miss stuff.
> 2. Avoiding interrupting one another- being able to see other people's faces means you can see when they're about to start speaking. That means you're less likely to talk over each other
Do you find this works in practice?
I don't think your average video call setup is good enough for it to make a difference. There's no eye contact, video quality is usually questionable, etc.
If I was a professional negotiator who knew how to read body language in an academic sense, then maybe I could get some use out of video calls. But I don't think I'm able to get the "instinctual" benefits.
So I'd say it's really situational. I'd prefer not to try and coordinate development sprints between two sub-teams offset by 12.5 hours from each other, but if I can't avoid that, then it sure helps to see faces to keep people feeling connected.
Obviously everyone will have their own personal experience. This is what worked for us.
One factor than can make it more tiring is poor connectivity and audio to the point where it becomes an effort to interpret what others are saying/making oneself understood. Other than that I think it's just a matter of what one is accustomed to.
The few times online meetings are stressing, IMO, are the same that would make me mad in person: people who keep talking without allowing interventions, people who don't what to say and just pretend to say things, people who have bad latency (yes, that take some seconds before speaking)
Maybe this is why:
> This, too, amounts to a persistent expenditure of social and cognitive labor as I inadvertently mind my image as well as the images of the other participants.
If I understand the author correctly, if they don't have a constant image of themselves presented to them, they aren't constantly processing how they look to others(!)? Well, in that case, I can see why Zoom would be more draining, but, you know, welcome to my world in any situation except when I'm alone or only with my SO.
Don't have the impression that this is disrupting the conversation too much.
“Sara, your voice cut out for 30 seconds and we didn’t hear any of that, can you please repeat?”
Two people talking: “Bfrhtxhlcyfoydoyd... oh, you go ahead” “no, you go ahead” “OK like I was saying, cofhlflydhlbdfykdjtxtc...”
“Hang on, I think Kumar just disconnected. We need him to continue.” “Can someone text Kumar and see if he can rejoin?”
“I can’t see more than five huge pixels of your presentation, Jan. Can you re-enable screen sharing?”
Things that are exhausting and don’t happen during face to face meetings...
Talk to anyone in process management/optimization and they'll probably rant to you about how bad most people are at holding and attending meetings. The "one page memo" at Amazon is kind of famous.
Zoom (and all its competitors) could do a lot to solve these problems and doesn't. That's the source of Zoom fatigue. People are bad at meetings, don't know they're bad at them, and hold bad meetings. It's stressful and tiring. Maybe Zoom just makes it more obvious when you can't easily joke around or grab a coffee. To me it seems that all these remote meeting software solutions are only focused on the purely technical problems, because they're really easy to specify and measure improvement. I haven't really seen anyone use technology to really go after the social problems of video conferencing yet, at least not like how Discord and Slack have done in their domains.
Need to have highish res video for faces still to be distinguishable though.
I wish it wasn’t so fringe so I could get non-tech people to use it with me.
The correct one is: https://www.mumble.info/
It's free, OSS, etc. It does require hosting a server, however.
It sounds like they made a mistake choosing that name/domain.
Any 'Zoom Fatigue' I'll shrug off with a nice walk and a coffee in 30 minutes. The stress from spending 3hrs bumper to bumper ruins more than just the entire day.
I put a sticker over my camera and I bought a headset with a hardware mute switch (so that it doesn't show) and now I can phase out just like I'd do in a regular meeting :)
It gives me some sense of physical security that hackers can’t penetrate the camera, or corporate can’t spy on me, since they’re now installing desktop screen capture spyware on your laptops. They can probably spy on you by stealthily activating the microphone, but that’s a different problem.
https://www.amazon.com/0-027in-MacBook-Smartphone-Protecting...
Makes it so much less tiring for long conversations.
I have not tried it for group conversations yet.
The only "fatigue" I find is frustration when people are talking over each other or multiple people trying to jump in at the same time. This generally happens either when latency is bad (e.g. US-Japan), connections are bad generally (MS Office decides to auto-update in the background and saturate your download), or just when it's a particularly contentious meeting with lots of people trying to get a word in edgewise, and all the normal cues you use to figure out when to talk just aren't there. And the reasons for those all seem self-evident.
(1) People trying to talk at the same time and taking several seconds to sort out who goes first.
(2) Glitches when everything freezes or even gets kicked out and brought back in, taking even longer to resolve.
(3) Wanting to say something and having to wait ages as people with less lag (I'm on the opposite side of the continent from everyone else) keep jumping in without a break.
Each instance of these raises my annoyance level. Dozens upon dozens of them even in a half-hour meeting can leave me totally exhausted from trying to tamp down the anger. By contrast, doing a 1:1 over VC isn't nearly so bad. Maybe an occasional bad moment, but not enough for fatigue to set in. I highly recommend that everyone do that comparison for themselves. The problems tend to increase more than linearly with number of participants, until there are enough that everyone accepts the need for strong moderation and two out of the three issues drop back to near zero.
And I have no motivation to get an external camera :)
If someone complains, you can say you don't want to clutter up the video feed or that you're having latency issues (also, they're a dick).
My setup is somewhat unique, as far as I can tell. I have the monitor on a wheeled TV stand and I use a small hand cranked standing desk to support my laptop and keyboard. The laptop is connected to a dock that sits below the monitor with one Thunderbolt 3 cable, then I have one USB cable returning from the hub to the desk to support my microphone and keyboard.
This setup gives me a ton of flexibility in how I position myself relative to the light in the room and the distance between my eyes and the monitor while maintaining a standing position.
Every meeting you have to think about audio, video, the background, how to chat, is mute really really on, what are you wearing, other people in the house, the fact your setup is being judged.
In an office you can just do it.
It's not until you have set yourself up and comfortable and confident you then notice all the little things missing that we know are important to humans, like touch and smell and body posture and 3D video and 3D sound which I think are not about fatigue but something else.
The Reason You’re Exhausted Is ‘Moral Fatigue’ https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/corona...
When face to face with someone every possible audio frequencies emited by the other person will reach you. This means your brain won't have much work to do to make sense of this information since it is 'complete'.
In a zoom meeting in most cases everybody is on his laptop using the built in laptop microphone. This means the sound will be mediocre at best concidering there isn't any network issue. Voice quality will be compressed and lack certain frequencies that you don't notice but help you decypher more quickly the other person speech.
That means that the brain energy necessary to only be able to understand the person in a zoom meeting for the same amount of time is more important than in a real life meeting.
Are you finding something difficult?
Is it something you've been doing frequently for a long time?
If not, then of course it's difficult.
Keep hope: We get good at the things we do in life.Video and audio lag seems to short circuit the communication interrupt window that happens normally in person to person communication, although in large enough gatherings that fails even IRL.
Another thing is that the way Zoom gallery mode works is a bit unnatural in IRL. In normal P2P communication your only looking at one set of eyes balls at a time. All of the sudden you have several sets of eyeballs you can see all it once. This makes it more like public speaking and less like a small tribe meeting.
First, the do a lot around synchronizing video and audio. On bad connections they slow and speed up video and audio to keep the appearance of coherence. Really, really hard stuff that other video conf systems fail at.
Also, they have audio settings to filter background noise. Basic settings around the mic, but the Advanced settings about noise cancellation ("Original Audio").
If you book online classes for music teachers, you'll see why they prefer Zoom and which settings they recommend.
> perceiving an image of a body in virtual space rather than perceiving a body itself in shared space may be worse than not perceiving a body at all.
So drop the video and go audio only.
Of course, I'm legally blind, so I can't really understand why perceiving facial expressions and body language is apparently so important. But one of my best friends is totally blind, and the two of us have communicated over two decades without ever being able to see each other, so it can work.
Whether any of that is actually beneficial is another question entirely. Personally, I have an easier time concentrating on the conversation when it is audio only.
If you video conference from your phone or laptop then you can move around.
The result is that we try to use the video channel to pre-allocate timeslots for speaking. You make your eyes bigger, you raise a finger... but sometimes people aren't looking at the video, or don't understand what your newly-invented cue actually means. This is all very tiring.
The overall quality of the call is much lower than real life, as well. People do not own good microphones or cameras, so you can't actually hear them or see them very well. The noise gate intervenes and just cuts off audio from time to time. It is maddening how bad it all is.
Many years ago when I worked for Bank of America, we had these multiple-100k Cisco videoconferencing setups. They worked really well. My friends and I were at work pretty late and there was a tornado warning, so we couldn't go home (we all biked). We went to these conference rooms, set up a link between the two rooms right next to each other, and had a totally normal conference. (Things were set up so that the entire wall of the room was a video screen, and it had an array of cameras, microphones, and speakers. Everything was tuned perfectly so it looked like the people in the other room were just sitting across the table from you. There was no latency, everyone was their normal size, and the audio and video quality were perfect. Obviously with two rooms across the hall from each other, there shouldn't be any latency... but at least the system didn't add its own. It makes a big difference.)
Finally, I think another issue is that people just aren't used to getting work done with video conferences. I worked as a remote team at Google, so pretty much 100% of my meetings were video conferences. 1:1s with my manager and everything else. The system suffered from the same quality/latency issues as anything else (though we did typically have good cameras and microphone arrays in every room), but through practice, people got good at getting stuff done despite the limitations. I never really felt fatigued the way I do on calls with random people at home. (I guess my tips are: have an agenda in advance, and use your screen share to show progress through the agenda. Call on people in remote locations: "Anyone from the New York room have anything to add?".)