The tech-nol-o-gy we put between our-selves and oth-ers tends to always cre-ate addi-tion-al strains on com-mu-ni-ca-tion, even as it enables near-con-stant, instant con-tact. When it comes to our now-pri-ma-ry mode of inter-act-ing — star-ing at each oth-er as talk-ing heads or Brady Bunch-style gal-leries — those stress-es have been iden-ti-fied by com-mu-ni-ca-tion experts as “Zoom fatigue,” now a sub-ject of study among psy-chol-o-gists who want to under-stand our always-con-nect-ed-but-most-ly-iso-lat-ed lives in the pan-dem-ic, and a top-ic for Today show seg-ments like the one above.
As Stan-ford researcher Jere-my Bailen-son vivid-ly explains to Today, Zoom fatigue refers to the burnout we expe-ri-ence from inter-act-ing with dozens of peo-ple for hours a day, months on end, through pret-ty much any video con-fer-enc-ing plat-form. (But, let’s face it, most-ly Zoom.) We may be famil-iar with the symp-toms already if we spend some part of our day on video calls or lessons. Zoom fatigue com-bines the prob-lems of over-work and tech-no-log-i-cal over-stim-u-la-tion with unique forms of social exhaus-tion that do not plague us in the office or the class-room.
Bailen-son, direc-tor of Stan-ford University’s Vir-tu-al Human Inter-ac-tion Lab, refers to this kind of burnout as “Non-ver-bal Over-load,” a col-lec-tion of “psy-cho-log-i-cal con-se-quences” from pro-longed peri-ods of dis-em-bod-ied con-ver-sa-tion. He has been study-ing vir-tu-al com-mu-ni-ca-tion for two decades and began writ-ing about the cur-rent prob-lem in April of 2020 in a Wall Street Jour-nal op-ed that warned, “soft-ware like Zoom was designed to do online work, and the tools that increase pro-duc-tiv-i-ty weren’t meant to mim-ic nor-mal social inter-ac-tion.”
Now, in a new schol-ar-ly arti-cle pub-lished in the APA jour-nal Tech-nol-o-gy, Mind, and Behav-ior, Bailen-son elab-o-rates on the argu-ment with a focus on Zoom, not to “vil-i-fy the com-pa-ny,” he writes, but because “it has become the default plat-form for many in acad-e-mia” (and every-where else, per-haps its own form of exhaus-tion). The con-stituents of non-ver-bal over-load include gaz-ing into each oth-ers’ eyes at close prox-im-i-ty for long peri-ods of time, even when we aren’t speak-ing to each oth-er.
Any-one who speaks for a liv-ing under-stands the inten-si-ty of being stared at for hours at a time. Even when speak-ers see vir-tu-al faces instead of real ones, research has shown that being stared at while speak-ing caus-es phys-i-o-log-i-cal arousal (Takac et al., 2019). But Zoom’s inter-face design con-stant-ly beams faces to every-one, regard-less of who is speak-ing. From a per-cep-tu-al stand-point, Zoom effec-tive-ly trans-forms lis-ten-ers into speak-ers and smoth-ers every-one with eye gaze.
On Zoom, we also have to expend much more ener-gy to send and inter-pret non-ver-bal cues, and with-out the con-text of the room out-side the screen, we are more apt to mis-in-ter-pret them. Depend-ing on the size of our screen, we may be star-ing at each oth-er as larg-er-than-life talk-ing heads, a dis-ori-ent-ing expe-ri-ence for the brain and one that lends more impact to facial expres-sions than may be war-rant-ed, cre-at-ing a false sense of inti-ma-cy and urgency. “When someone’s face is that close to ours in real life,” writes Vig-nesh Ramachan-dran at Stan-ford News, “our brains inter-pret it as an intense sit-u-a-tion that is either going to lead to mat-ing or to con-flict.”
Unless we turn off the view of our-selves on the screen — which we gen-er-al-ly don’t do because we’re con-scious of being stared at — we are also essen-tial-ly sit-ting in front of a mir-ror while try-ing to focus on oth-ers. The con-stant self-eval-u-a-tion adds an addi-tion-al lay-er of stress and tax-es the brain’s resources. In face-to-face inter-ac-tions, we can let our eyes wan-der, even move around the room and do oth-er things while we talk to peo-ple. “There’s a grow-ing research now that says when peo-ple are mov-ing, they’re per-form-ing bet-ter cog-ni-tive-ly,” says Bailen-son. Zoom inter-ac-tions, con-verse-ly, can inhib-it move-ment for long peri-ods of time.
“Zoom fatigue” may not be as dire as it sounds, but rather the inevitable tri-als of a tran-si-tion-al peri-od, Bailen-son sug-gests. He offers solu-tions we can imple-ment now: using the “hide self-view” but-ton, mut-ing our video reg-u-lar-ly, set-ting up the tech-nol-o-gy so that we can fid-get, doo-dle, and get up and move around.… Not all of these are going to work for every-one — we are, after all, social-ized to sit and stare at each oth-er on Zoom; refus-ing to par-tic-i-pate might send unin-tend-ed mes-sages we would have to expend more ener-gy to cor-rect. Bailen-son fur-ther describes the phe-nom-e-non in the BBC Busi-ness Dai-ly pod-cast inter-view above.
“Video-con-fer-enc-ing is here to stay,” Bailen-son admits, and we’ll have to adapt. “As media psy-chol-o-gists it is our job,” he writes to his col-leagues in the new arti-cle, to help “users devel-op bet-ter use prac-tices” and help “tech-nol-o-gists build bet-ter inter-faces.” He most-ly leaves it to the tech-nol-o-gists to imag-ine what those are, though we our-selves have more con-trol over the plat-form than we col-lec-tive-ly acknowl-edge. Could we maybe admit, Bailen-son writes, that “per-haps a dri-ver of Zoom fatigue is sim-ply that we are tak-ing more meet-ings than we would be doing face-to-face”?
Read about the “Zoom Exhaus-tion & Fatigue Scale (ZEF Scale)” devel-oped by Bailen-son and his col-leagues at Stan-ford and the Uni-ver-si-ty of Gothen-burg here. Then take the sur-vey your-self, and see where you rank in the ZEF cat-e-gories of gen-er-al fatigue, visu-al fatigue, social fatigue, moti-va-tion-al fatigue, and emo-tion-al fatigue.
Relat-ed Con-tent:
How Infor-ma-tion Over-load Robs Us of Our Cre-ativ-i-ty: What the Sci-en-tif-ic Research Shows
In 1896, a French Car-toon-ist Pre-dict-ed Our Social-ly-Dis-tanced Zoom Hol-i-day Gath-er-ings
Hayao Miyazaki’s Stu-dio Ghi-b-li Releas-es Free Back-grounds for Vir-tu-al Meet-ings: Princess Mononoke, Spir-it-ed Away & More
Josh Jones is a writer and musi-cian based in Durham, NC. Fol-low him at @jdmagness
