Hello there š
Welcome to issue nine of Manufacturing Serendipity, a loosely connected, somewhat rambling collection of the unexpected and often delightful things Iāve recently encountered.
Grab yourself a suitable beverage and enjoyā¦
Part I: Good Things Iāve Encountered Online
If, like me, youāve been struggling to understand why Zoom meetings (or whatever video conferencing platform youāre using) are leaving you feeling quite so exhausted then you might be interested to hear that communication Professor Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab, has been examining the psychological consequences of spending hours a day on these platforms.
I originally came across this research via the write up on Stanford News, which links to Bailensonās original peer-reviewed article.
Bailenson identified four possible explanations for Zoom Fatigue:
- Constraints on physical mobility – Audio (phone) conversations, and in-person meetings allow people more freedom of movement. But with video conferencing, most cameras have a set field of view, meaning a person has to generally stay in the same spot. Movement is limited in ways that are not natural. āThereās a growing research now that suggests when people are moving, theyāre performing better cognitively,ā Bailenson said.
- Cognitive load – Bailenson notes that in regular face-to-face interaction, each of us makes and interprets gestures and nonverbal cues subconsciously. But in video chats, we have to work harder to send and receive signals. (NB Iām not sure the extent to which I agree with this – lots of people struggle to interpret nonverbal cues in-person too, however Iād acknowledge that itās probably nevertheless easier to send and receive these cues in-person, versus via Zoom).
- Increased self-evaluation from staring at video of oneself – We do not typically wander through our days staring at our own reflections. If youāre in an in-person meeting, you donāt see your own face the whole time. But on Zoom, you do. Bailenson cited studies that have demonstrated that when we see reflections of ourselves, weāre often more self-critical.
The increased self-evaluation problem definitely resonated strongly with me; but Bailensonās final observation is eye-opening, and suddenly a whole bunch of the things Iāve been feeling make more sense.
Bailenson noted that if youāre having a one-on-one conversation on video, youāre seeing a personās face at a size which simulates very close in-person proximity:
When someoneās face is that close to ours in real life, our brains interpret it as an intense situation that is either going to lead to mating or to conflict.
Dear reader, I think heās suggesting weāre all spending hours a day in fuck or fight mode.
Or, perhaps more accurately, because we know we donāt want to fuck our fellow Zoom meeting-goers, at some level, weāre just in fight (or perhaps fight or flight) mode.
I feel this point is worth exploring and explaining a little further – so here goes:
For just a moment, letās imagine COVID-19 doesnāt exist, and therefore, being physically close to other people represents no risk of infection.
You walk into a crowded lift (or elevator for my American friends). You are in unavoidably close proximity to other people in the lift. All of these other people are strangers.
Do you face the person nearest you? Or do you turn your back to them?
If at all possible, you turn your back to them, right?
But this lift is really crowded and you canāt position yourself with your back to everyone, and so maybe youāll look upwards at the ceiling, or watch the floor numbers change as you ascend or descend, or if youāre like me, youāll cast your gaze down and study your own shoes intensely.
Why do we do this?
Turning our backs and averting our gaze helps to ease our discomfort.
But where does the discomfort come from?
Situations where weāre in close physical proximity and making eye contact feel intimate; and if that intimacy feels inappropriate (i.e. if it makes us feel vulnerable or otherwise uncomfortable) we do whatever we can to diminish those feelings. Most of the time weāll physically move ourselves away. But in situations like crowded lifts, where we canāt fix the close physical proximity problem, weāll typically avoid eye contact.
Essentially, I think we do this to avoid falling into full-blown fight or flight mode.
The problem is, on Zoom calls we canāt fix the proximity problem, and neither can we avoid eye contact. Actually, weāre subjecting each other to far more eye contact than we would normally:
In an in-person meeting, people will variously be looking at the speaker, taking notes or looking elsewhere. But on Zoom calls, everyone is looking at everyone, all the time. A listener is treated nonverbally like a speaker, so even if you donāt speak once in a meeting, you are still looking at faces staring at you. The amount of eye contact is dramatically increased.
In short, in Zoom calls we feel like weāre in closer proximity to other people than weāre really comfortable with, AND weāre making more eye contact than usual, AND weāre doing it for hours and hours every single day.
Plus thereās additional weirdness right? (Bailenson doesnāt highlight this but I think it merits a mention.)
Prior to the pandemic how many of your coworkers, clients, or bosses had you invited into your home? Not many, right? But theyāre all invited now.
Moreover, many of us are working out of our bedrooms; a space which ordinarily, only people who weāre comfortable being intimate with, would gain admittance to.
Everything about it is unnatural and uncomfortable, and as a result many of us are spending hours a day in this hyper-aroused fight or flight state.
Those feelings of exhaustion make a little more sense now, huh?
Moar serendipitous finds:
This twitter account is really great and I particularly enjoyed this tweet:
Wikipediaās delightful page on the history ofĀ Spite Houses:
AĀ spite houseĀ is aĀ building constructedĀ orĀ modified either to irritate neighbours, or any other party withĀ stakes in the land. BecauseĀ long-term occupationĀ is not the primary purpose of these houses, they frequently sport strange and impractical structures.
Hereās an example:
TheĀ story behind the Skinny House inĀ Boston, MassachusettsĀ (pictured above)Ā is disputed. Some say it came about like this: two brothers inherited land from their father. While one brother (letās call him Bob) was away serving in theĀ military, the other (letās call him Brian) builds a large home. Brian assumes that his brother Bob wonāt bother building a house on the tiny plot of land thatās left, and essentially, heāll get the lot. Bob however, has other ideas. Rather than abandon the plot of land, he builds the skinny house (which blocks the sunlight and ruins Brianās view) in order to spite his brother.
Others contend that its unnamed builder built the house to shut out air and light from the home of a hostile neighbour (also nameless) with whom he had an ongoing dispute.Ā
For women in economics, the hostility is out in the openā¦
Studies have found that the field of economics is plagued by a problem of gender bias. The latest evidence comes from the types of questions posed at seminars.
Dr. Modestino and Dr. Wolfers, along with two other economists, Pascaline Dupas and Muriel Niederle, recruited dozens of graduate students across the country to attend hundreds of economics conferences to record both the number and the nature of questions levelled at the men and women who were presenting their research.
They found not only that women faced more questions than men, but also that women were more likely to face questionsĀ that were patronising or hostile.Iād be fascinated to see a similar study conducted in our industry.
ArtistĀ BiancoshockĀ turns abandoned manholes into cramped miniature roomsā¦
TitledĀ Borderlife, Biancoshock says he created these pieces to highlight the extreme conditions many people are forced to live in – citing the 600 people in Bucharest who were, at that time, living underground in the sewer system.Ā (I rediscovered this thanks to one of my own swipe files, the original installation dates back to 2016.)
Part II: Books Iām Reading Right Now
This newsletter is even longer than usual apparently, and Substack keeps on chucking out warnings about reaching deliverability limits.
As such Iāll keep this section short, and just give you my book recommendation of the fortnight – Potiki by Patricia Grace. Set on the coast of New Zealand, this novel tells the story of a small MÄori community whose ancestral land is threatened by developers who seek to turn it into a hub for tourism. Told from the perspective of a handful of its MÄori characters, the novel offers an intimate insight into this community, their mythology and beliefs and what binds them to their ancestral land.
Despite originally being published in 1986, this novel remains achingly current, New Zealandās government apparently continues to seize MÄori land, even as it simultaneously seeks to provide redress for the land that was taken in the past.
Part III: Things Iāve Been Watching
Dear reader, I have mainly been re-watching X Files. I highly recommend it.
I also watched the much maligned Netflix documentary: Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel. The documentary tells the story of Elisa Lam, a young Canadian traveller, who goes missing, and was eventually found dead at the hotel in 2013.
Dear reader, you should know that what follows contains spoilers – skip this section if you havenāt yet watched this documentary, but still plan on doing so.
I feel like much of the criticism levelled at the documentary looks like this:
And you know what, in some ways, thatās fair. It probably didnāt need to be four hours long.
But it worries me that this is the most common criticism, because this is not the only direction in which this documentary, and indeed many other true crime documentaries are problematic.
Ellen E. Jones writing for the Guardian asks:
āWhat is the point of true-crime documentaries? This is the uncomfortable question that those of us who consume them by the bucketload must sooner or later confront. If itās just someone elseās suffering dressed up as diverting entertainment, then that canāt be OK, can it?
But if there is also the possibility that these documentaries might illuminate an important aspect of cultural history, or human psychology, or even prevent future suffering by bringing perpetrators to justice, then there is some value to our viewing, after all.ā
She raises an excellent point, huh?
I feel like all true crime documentaries are to some extent exploitative, and The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel is no exception. As Jones notes:
āā¦various attempts to lighten the mood with historical detours and commentary from cutesy eccentrics such as the general manager with the Veronica Lake wave, feel, at best, in very poor taste.
It is not spooky, it is just sad; desperately sad that a family have lost their beloved daughter and sad, too, that in Los Angeles, as in many other places around the world, the result of human beings in a mental health crisis is avoidable tragedy.ā
For the record, I agree unequivocally with Jones.
But, I think this documentary did succeed to illuminate an important aspect of our psychology – albeit by accident, rather than by design.
The Elisa Lam case captured the publicās imagination because it was spooky. That footage of her in the lift was interpreted as spooky. How and where her body was found was spooky.
A bunch of āinternet sleuthsā came up with a range of spooky theories: she was killed by a Mexican death metal singer, she was the victim of a copycat killing inspired by the 2005 horror flick Dark Water, she was involved in an international conspiracy to spread a new strain of tuberculosisā¦
I canāt help but wonder if peopleās dissatisfaction with the conclusion of this documentary is, (in part at least), that the truth of Elisa Lamās case isnāt spooky at all.
I suspect that on some level, weāre more interested in spookiness than the unhappy truth.
And I think perhaps, that speaks uncomfortable volumes about our psychology, and indeed our behaviour.
Part IV: Things Iām doing
As mentioned previously, this section is here to keep me honest. Iām hoping that by documenting some of the things Iām planning to do, itāll give me the extra motivation required to actually do them. So, hereās what Iāve been up to:
Drink Digital
I mentioned previously that Iāll be taking part in Drink Digital, an online meet up organised by Boom Online.
Iāll be giving a talk called āDifficult Second Album Syndromeā which has been occupying what feels like every waking minute of my life for the past two weeks. Right now I have more than 300 slides for whatās supposed to be a 20 minute talk, so I still have a bunch of work to do.
Wayne Barker, and Ian Lockwood (both from Boom) will also be speaking, plus theyāll be a Q&A with Gisele Navarro (NeoMam), Mark Johnstone (Content Hubble), Pete Bingham (Boom), and me after the talks.
Itās happening on Thursday 11th March at 6.30pm UK time. I think itās going to be aces, and if you fancy coming along you can get tickets here.
Confidence Now
For the past six weeks Iāve been taking part in Kirsty Hulseās Confidence Now program, which is without a doubt the very best gift that Iāve bought myself this year. Kirsty will be running a new program in April, and Iād strongly recommend you check it out š
So whatās next?
Aside from the talk next week, Iāve no other major plans right now.
Iām going to take a little time to reflect on some of the things Iāve learned from the Confidence Now program, try to exercise a little more, take better care of myself, and attempt to get my disordered eating and sleeping back on track.
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