You Are Not Zoom Fatigued
But you may be giving control to technologies you should be controlling.
Is it a meeting if someone’s time isn’t wasted? Who among us hasn’t, at some point, felt like a meeting (or two, or three, or twenty) could have been an email?
Nevertheless, meetings persist — during the pandemic, National Bureau of Economic Research found that, on average, they increased by 13%, with 14% more people participating. (The silver lining? It appears that overall meeting length decreased by 20%.)
Of course, all these meetings have been happening online. So, people are decrying Zoom fatigue. And sure, an argument can be made that “The cognitive load is much higher in video chats.”
But I don’t believe we are Zoom fatigued. I believe, instead, that we have given control to a technology we should be controlling.
When I bought my first smartphone in the 2000s and started texting, I didn’t forget how to have conversations or grow tired of them — I enhanced those conversations by working with the technology. It’s the same with Zoom (or Teams or Skype or whatever you use).
But control is not lost, and we can take it back. In fact, there are a few things we can all do starting tomorrow.
Take care of your voice.
Many of us prepared for decades to talk with other human beings in person, but not so much over two-dimensional screens. Overcompensating, talking louder than normal, talking more than usual, and filling the silence are all things U.Melbourne’s Amy Hume says we are wont to do on virtual meetings — all of which can stress our voiceboxes.
If that’s happening to you, take a moment and readjust. Reduce the caffeine, vamp up your water intake, space out your meetings, and try audio-enhancing options like headphones with microphones to cut down on vocal overuse.
Stop looking at yourself.
Stanford’s Jeremy Bailenson, Ph.D. says, “Zoom users are seeing reflections of themselves at a frequency and duration that hasn’t been seen before in the history of media and likely the history of people.” Bailenson goes on to describe the prospective “prosocial” benefits, but he also…
