Breaking out of Break Out Rooms
“Eh, so, uhm, how was your Christmas, guys?” rather strenuously, I ask people whom I have neither met nor spoken to before. The attempt to keep the conversation going is quite unfruitful, and after my fellow students and I exchange a few words, a great silence settles in yet another Zoom break-out room. When in Tarantino’s neo-noir comedy crime film Pulp Fiction (1994), Mia Wallace asks Vincent Vega whether he hates uncomfortable silences, and is then puzzled as to “why do we feel it’s necessary to yak about bullsh** in order to feel comfortable?”, I wonder whether the question would still be as pertinent if discussed in a Zoom meeting rather than in a restaurant over burgers and $5 milkshakes.
By this time, I’m sure we’ve all experienced the phenomenon known as ‘Zoom fatigue’. Suggestions on how to reduce it have been floating around the Internet: “How to Not be Socially Awkward at Zoom,” “6 unconventional tips to be less awkward on Zoom,” “Here’s A Simple Solution To Avoid The Awkward Zoom Pause,” “Why your Zoom calls are awkward…and how to fix it,” among many others. Although the media outlets range from personal blogs to the BBC and The New York Times, with some falling somewhere in between, they all preach the same thing: having a professional setup, decent equipment, warming up, dressing properly, and knowing when to go mute can drastically improve our relationship with the interface.
Despite all these relatively useful tips on how to navigate the virtual meetings without feeling like you are on stage with everybody watching you and getting increasingly paranoid about it, the hackneyed saying that “it’s only awkward if you make it awkward” does not seem to live up to its expectations in this particular case. The discomfort accompanies almost every Zoom call and affects even the least socially awkward of us.
Being aware of our presence and conscious of our behaviour on camera is one of the reasons for such an unpleasant state of affairs; it is, in fact, quite a challenge not to look at yourself at least once throughout a call even when you are not a narcissist obsessed with your reflection. If Narcissus was a modern-day figure, he would have probably turned into a flower much sooner. As it so happens, our face is there, unless we turn the camera off and stay out of it, and while it has been proposed by some people that disabling or enabling it should be optional, the majority sees things differently and believe that having our cameras on means staying more involved and committed to a conversation as well as establishing a deeper connection with those in the same room. But what if your internet connection is too slow to actually bring that about, and the faces you see on the screen keep lagging? As research shows, ‘Zoom fatigue’ is caused primarily due to that inability to simultaneously perceive verbal and visual cues which are either frozen or gone completely. This kind of multitasking can be tiresome and anxiety-provoking, to say the least.
Here, another question that Uma Thurman’s character poses in Pulp Fiction seems to ring a bell: “In conversation, do you listen or wait to talk?”. When it comes to Zoom, everyone seems to listen first, and only then waits to talk, which is totally reasonable considering that we are unable to know or predict whose turn it is to speak. That is another reason for the unavoidable awkwardness of a break-out room that will close in upon you sooner or later after you enter it. Although there is always something to discuss at first (if you are a university student, you are sent into the room specifically for that purpose), the conversation fizzles out to the point when everyone feels like listening and no one feels like talking. After a while, someone assumes the responsibility to switch it to another, not completely relevant, subject.
Connecting with others through Zoom is not one of the simplest tasks. While we are in the same room mentally, physically we are not. So how should we go about this? How can we avoid feeling out of place? How can we be better prepared for the indeterminism that awaits us on “the other side”? I try, but not always succeed, to think of entering a break-out room as entering any new situation. Finding yourself in a new environment requires adapting and, as a general rule, experiencing some discomfort.
I believe that there is no right or wrong way to deal with the situation at hand, and Healthy Zoom can have an entirely different meaning to each one of us, be it turning the camera off or wearing ‘professional attire’. The key thing, I’d say, is learning how to be comfortable with silence and allowing it to happen. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you've found somebody special – which is rather unfortunate for I can’t draw yet another analogy to Pulp Fiction – but it does mean that you aren’t putting any extra pressure on yourself.
