Reasons of “Zoom Fatigue”

I Lead-in.

a)    What are the video conferencing tools available in your country? How do people use those tools?

b)    What is your experience of using video conferencing tools?

c)    What are the advantages and disadvantages of video conferencing software?

II Vocabulary focus. Match the words to their definitions. Use six words in your sentences.

1.	science fiction	a)	tending not to speak much
2.	fatigue	b)	not interesting or exciting
3.	self-consciousness	c)	to make something with skill
4.	draining	d)	the advantage of a situation
5.	overlap	e)	the tendency to prefer one thing to another
6.	taciturn	f)	consisting of fixed words and repeated ideas
7.	glitch	g)	a set of letters in a particular design
8.	middling	h)	books and films about imagined future especially about space travel and other planets
9.	lag	i)	a positive statement
10.	threshold	j)	causing you to lose most of your energy
11.	to utter	k)	extreme tiredness
12.	to craft	l)	unwilling to give information
13.	hedge	m)	unreliable
14.	forthright	n)	a small problem
15.	to come across	o)	an uncomfortable feeling when you are worried about what people think about you
16.	cagey	p)	to say something
17.	to yield	q)	a problem or difficulty
18.	snag	r)	unclear and hard to see
19.	assertion	s)	average, neither very good nor very bad
20.	fuzzy	t)	to make a certain impression
21.	font	u)	an evasive statement
22.	bias	v)	a delay between two things happening
23.	dodgy	w)	honest and direct
24.	bland	x)	to give up the control
25.	formulaic	y)	a point at which something starts
26.	upside	z)	a situation when two things cover the same area

III Follow the link below. Focus on the words and expressions (study definitions), match the terms to their definitions, solve the crossword puzzle, complete the quiz, chase down the correct answer to earn points, unscramble words and phrases (correct order of letters), type in words to fill in the blanks, test your knowledge of  vocabulary.

https://www.studystack.com/flashcard-3225330

IV Look through the article. Six sentences have been removed. Read the article and choose from the sentence (A-H) the one which fits each gap (1-6). There are two sentences which you do not need to use.

Readers of a certain age will remember when long-distance calls were expensive, international calls ruinously so, three-way calls exciting and video calls the stuff of science fiction. 1)____________. Today, international video hangouts are free and widely available. Instead of treating them as a miracle, endless commentators have complained about “Zoom fatigue”. Much of their criticism has been about the video: a lack of eye contact, self-consciousness (whether about skin, hair or bookshelves) and the like.

2)________. Studies find that most cultures observe a conversational rule of “no gap, no overlap”. Despite the various stereotypes that exist about taciturn or interrupting ethnicities, turn-taking is well-organised and almost instantaneous from Mexico to Denmark to Japan.

All that is disrupted in online meetings. Audio and video are chopped into tiny pieces, sent via different channels to the recipient, and then reassembled. Such “packet switching” is robust. DARPA, the Pentagon agency that pioneered the internet, wanted to be sure an enemy could not cut a single line and disable the connection. But some packets may arrive late for reassembly. When they do, the software has a basic choice: to wait, leading to a delay, or to gather what is available, leading to glitches.

Video-calling platforms tend to use audio that arrives quickly but is of middling quality. Zoom says it aims for, and often achieves, a lag of just 150 milliseconds— quicker than the blink of an eye. Yet even when that goal is reached (and it often isn’t, especially when the internet is crowded), that is a lot more time than it seems. 3)___________. The wait easily exceeds that threshold if Zoom users experience a 150-millisecond lag after the first speaker, followed by another 150 milliseconds for the reply.

4)_________. A study by Felicia Roberts of Purdue University and colleagues found that positive answers to questions (such as “Can you give me a ride?”, “Sure”) were rated as less genuinely willing if the responder took more than 700 milliseconds to reply. That is because it requires less time than that to plan and utter an automatic, positive statement. Above that limit, hearers correctly perceive that the speaker is using extra time to craft a response, perhaps a hedge or a polite “no”. Unfortunately, this means that colleagues who think they are giving forthright answers might come across as cagey on video calls.

A bigger problem may be interruptions, says Ms Roberts, as delays mean that speakers are not able to properly time their turns. In person, when two people overlap one speaker may quickly yield; on a video call it takes longer for this clash to be resolved. Repairing these snags regularly is tiresome.

To make matters worse, colleagues who are hard to understand, even if only for technical reasons, are rated as less trustworthy. 5)__________. In humans’ primitive psychology, the simpler something is to understand, the easier it is to believe. This same bias would unfairly punish the worker cursed with a dodgy internet connection.

With effort, listeners are able to mentally compensate for glitches and delays. “The First Circle”, a novel by Alexander Solzhenitsyn published in 1968, suggests darkly that this is easiest to do during bland exchanges. 6)__________. The hearer gives a surprisingly high score, despite the spasmodic transmission: he has correctly guessed the missing words, thanks to the formulaic propaganda in the newspaper. Any meeting where it is so easy to predict what colleagues will say raises the question of why it is held in the first place.

There is at least one upside. When workers finally return to offices, they may actually look forward to real face-to-face meetings again—to say nothing of post-work gatherings with friends.

  

A.   Yet the main reasons Zoom conversations are draining are to do with audio, in which the limitations of the technology run up against habits of speech.

B.   In the book, intellectuals at a Soviet work camp test a secure calling system by having one engineer read a newspaper over the line, and another rate the quality of the call.

C.   Under “no gap, no overlap” rules, the typical silence between the end of one face-to-face conversational turn and the next is about 200 milliseconds.

D.   How quickly people take yesterday’s achievements for granted.

E.    Adding these pauses to work calls can make speakers seem less convincing.

F.    It is the distress that every time you see someone online, such as your colleagues, that reminds you we should really be in the workplace together

G.   Studies find that a foreign accent reduces the believability of factual assertions (such as “a giraffe can go without water longer than a camel”), as does printing such statements in a fuzzy or low-contrast font.

H.   An added factor, says Shuffler, is that if we are physically on camera, we are very aware of being watched.

V Comprehension check. Answer the questions.

1)    What does the phrase ‘people quickly take yesterday’s achievements for granted’ mean?

2)    What aspects of video conferences do people criticise most often?  

3)    Why do people feel tired when they use Zoom a lot?  

4)    What does ‘no gap, no overlap’ rule mean?  

5)    Why is ‘no gap, no overlap’ rule disrupted in online meetings?  

6)    What audio lag do video-calling programs have? Is it similar to the lag in face-to-face human communication?  

7)    Why does the lag in communication create problems and lead to fatigue?  

8)    How do accents influence the quality of conversations via video calls?  

9)    What kind of phrases do people find easy to believe?   

10)    How can people find a way to compensate for technical glitches?    

11)    What is the upside of the wide use of video calls?  

VI OVER TO YOU. Discuss the role of video conferencing in your work or education. Have you ever experience ‘Zoom fatigue’? What are the upsides of using video conferencing tools for you?