DRMacIver's Notebook
Figuring out what hurts
Figuring out what hurts
One of the biggest reasons why the victim of metonymy concept is important is that it helps you figure out what you need to vary to fix a problem.
Something interesting that’s happened to me recently is that I’ve had several work calls that were 2-3 hours long. Part of why this is interesting is that they didn’t feel that long, because we were pair programming on Tuple. This meant we weren’t looking at each other’s faces (didn’t even have our webcams on).
Not that there’s anything wrong with my colleague’s face you understand. But there’s something about looking at faces on video calls that ends up producing something like fatigueYour regular reminder that fatigue isn’t a real thing.. I have recurring video calls with dear friends and family whose faces I enjoy seeing very much, and usually my brain is mush an hour in.
I also have a recurring phone call with a friend, which I usually take while walking or doing chores, and I have no such mush effect. I’m reasonably sure the difference is the fact that it’s voice only and my attention is focused on something rather than someone.
In constrast, spending time with someone in person has no such limitations. Part of that is that you don’t actually spend most of your in person interactions staring directly at someone’s face, you look around, you look at things together, your gaze wanders. This is normal. There’s somethign about the fixity of the face on the screen that is a real problem.
Video calls seem particularly prone to being treated as a unitary thing that just has intrinsic problems, even when those problems are easily fixed or avoided. e.g. back during the height of the pandemic I did singing lessons online. I’m glad I did it but it was, frankly, a bit of a miserable experience to do online. My singing teacher clearly thought so too.
One of the things that was bad about it was that she insisted on trying to keep time with me as I sung. It took quite some time of me explaining in detail how latency worked and how what she was asking for was literally a violation of the laws of physicsI think this isn’t technically true and we were physically close enough that a point to point laser comms could have got latency acceptably low. before we figured out better ways to do time keeping using a metronome app.
I assume she would have figured this out eventually - we’re now at a point where most people have figured out you can’t sing together on a video call at least - but it was just sortof baffling to be faced with someone so specifically doing the thing that obviously wasn’t working and just blaming it on “well video calls suck”.
Once we’d fixed this and switched to using a local metronome it worked much better. I still didn’t love doing singing lessons online, but it was no longer an active exercise in frustration.
This is the thing about attending to the specific: When you know what, precisely, it is about it that hurts, you can fix that.
Not all my calls with friends and family have moved to the less painful mode, for one reason or another, but I’ve figured out my own affordances for them. Sometimes I cook while talking, sometimes I play Slay the Spire during a call, and both of these engage my eyes in a way that allows me to maintain the actual conversation.
And sometimes I just put up with it. Looking at my friends and family has its upsides! But knowing the source of the specific problem gives me options that I wouldn’t have if I just treated the effect as a mysterious gestalt effect of video calls.Not that I actually fully understand why the specific thing causes this problem, but I don’t need to to work aroudn it.