Why is video-conferencing so exhausting?
The problem with video-conferencing is that the body is but isn’t there… The situation is more like a face-to-face encounter than most any other medium, but, for that very reason, it frustrates us because it is, nonetheless, significantly different. I suppose we might think of it as something like a conversational uncanny valley. The full range of what the mind assumes should be available to it when it perceives a body, simply isn’t there…
Participants are not, in fact, sharing the same physical space, making it difficult to perceive our conversation partners as part of a cohesive perceptive field. They lose their integrity as objects of perception, which is to say they don’t appear whole and independent; they appear truncated and as parts of a representation within another object of perception, the screen.
