<story><title>A theory of Zoom fatigue</title><url>https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/a-theory-of-zoom-fatigue</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>djsumdog</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t know about those theories. I suspect something else. Do you remember landlines, and how responsive they were? You would say things back and fourth and the conversation just worked, even on three-way and conference calls? There was very little noticeable lag!&lt;p&gt;Even in the early cellphone days, I&amp;#x27;d often prefer using my landline. There was less lag. Cellphones felt like speakerphones where it tries to do that cancellation stuff and you feel like the conversation is split into pieces .. like a walkie-talkie where you don&amp;#x27;t control the &amp;quot;over&amp;quot; &amp;#x2F; button press.&lt;p&gt;Cellphones have gotten better, but they&amp;#x27;ve never really hit the latency of landlines (or maybe they have and I didn&amp;#x27;t notice. I never actually talk to people on my phone any more). Video conferencing like that that but worse. It&amp;#x27;s really apparent if you&amp;#x27;re on a remote team and you&amp;#x27;re next to someone on the same call. You can hear that delay.&lt;p&gt;I like a lot of the fatigue comes from that delay. We can connect more people now, with video, over great distances, but it does come at a cost at moving from virtual dedicated circuits to package switches networks and transcoding on some central server.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>saurik</author><text>Landlines were so fast and so &amp;quot;direct&amp;quot; in their latency (where distance correlates very directly with time, due to a lack of &amp;quot;hops&amp;quot;) that local phone calls were faster than the speed of sound across a table, and for a bit after they came out--before people generally got used to seemingly random latency--local calls felt &amp;quot;intimate&amp;quot;, like as if you were talking to someone in bed with their head right next to you; I also have heard stories of negotiators who had gotten really tuned to analyzing people&amp;#x27;s wait times while thinking that long distance calls were confusing and threw them off their game. But no: cell phones haven&amp;#x27;t become as fast as landlines and likely never can due to fundamental contrast of compressed packetized routed audio vs. the speed of an analog signal propagating over a circuit-switched wired connection.</text></comment>
<story><title>A theory of Zoom fatigue</title><url>https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/a-theory-of-zoom-fatigue</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>djsumdog</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t know about those theories. I suspect something else. Do you remember landlines, and how responsive they were? You would say things back and fourth and the conversation just worked, even on three-way and conference calls? There was very little noticeable lag!&lt;p&gt;Even in the early cellphone days, I&amp;#x27;d often prefer using my landline. There was less lag. Cellphones felt like speakerphones where it tries to do that cancellation stuff and you feel like the conversation is split into pieces .. like a walkie-talkie where you don&amp;#x27;t control the &amp;quot;over&amp;quot; &amp;#x2F; button press.&lt;p&gt;Cellphones have gotten better, but they&amp;#x27;ve never really hit the latency of landlines (or maybe they have and I didn&amp;#x27;t notice. I never actually talk to people on my phone any more). Video conferencing like that that but worse. It&amp;#x27;s really apparent if you&amp;#x27;re on a remote team and you&amp;#x27;re next to someone on the same call. You can hear that delay.&lt;p&gt;I like a lot of the fatigue comes from that delay. We can connect more people now, with video, over great distances, but it does come at a cost at moving from virtual dedicated circuits to package switches networks and transcoding on some central server.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>StefanKarpinski</author><text>That and you’re constantly struggling to decipher audio and make yourself understood. Much like talking in a bar that’s too loud is exhausting. A lot of the exhaustion seems like it’s the difficulty of compensating for a high latency, low-bandwidth, low quality experience. We’re just not evolved for it—reality is the opposite of all of those things.</text></comment>