Months into our lockdowns, many of us are becoming intimately familiar withZoom fatigue. This is the particular dead-eyed, mind-numbing exhaustion I feel at the end of pretty much every video meeting I’ve ever attended.

Recently the Internet has exploded with reasons Zoom exhausts you more than in-person interaction. For example:

• you can’t makeeye contact properly;

• you miss non-verbalsignalsthat help you talk in turn and read emotions;

• you areconstantly switching your attentionbetween different faces, voices, and messages;

• you can’t stopstaring at your own faceself-consciously; and

• the slight lag in response times can make people seemless friendly.

我在这里要补充的另一个原因是极速如此耗竭——我认为这个原因比上述任何一个都重要得多。Zoom还缺少另一个基本的社交互动元素。缺失的部分是joint attention: knowingly co-attending to something with someone else.

共同注意是幼儿社会学习的基础。When babies attend to the same things as their caretakers, they start to understand other people better—what they want, what they think, what they’redoing. Joint attention helps a lot when you’re a baby learning a language: when someone says a word, you can attend to whatever they’re attending to in order to figure out what that word means. As a result, babies that jointly attend learn their languages faster. Lack of joint attention makes social and language learning very difficult.Difficulties initiating joint attentionare consistently observed in children with autism spectrum disorder.

Joint attention scaffolds communication and cooperation through adulthood as well. Newer studies in cognitive science are starting to describe the ways joint attention helps usprocessandretain information.Observations of joint agency—e.g. building a Lego model together—highlight how crucial joint attention is. In shared projects, we regularly point to things, asking others to attend to what we’re attending to. It keeps us in sync. Joint attention literally makes it possible for humans todo things together, rather than merelydoing similar things in parallel.

Most in-person meetings are models of joint attention. In a meeting, the jointly attended thing could be a PowerPoint presentation, a document, or a whiteboard. In a museum it might be a sculpture; in a lab, it might be a beaker playing host to an interesting chemical interaction.

The problem with Zoom is that it obliterates crucial cues to joint attention. The problem is not that you and your Zoom mates cannot, in fact, both attend to the same thing; plenty of Zoom meetings involve multiple bleary-eyed hermits paying effortful attention to the same screen-shared slides. Instead, the problem is that you cannottellif others are really paying attention to the same thing that you are paying attention to. Andthis是共同关注的一个重要方面:知道你不是一个人在关注这件事。共同关注在某种程度上是相互的，这对所有参与者来说都是绝对明显的。(Just exactly how to describe this mutualness is a matter ofconsiderable philosophical debate.)

Why can’t you know what people are paying attention to over Zoom? Because paying thoughtful close attention and completely ignoring the Zoom window look practically identical to your Zoom mates. Whether you’re reading the class slides or watchingThe Officeon Netflix for the 6thtime, you will be gazing at the same part of the screen. Usually, in face-to-face interaction,direction of gazeis a really important indicator of human attention. But on Zoom, your direction of gaze just doesn’t indicate much about your attention at all. It might indicate attention towards the computer screen, but—as any classroom instructor can now tell you—that means very little about your attention paid to what’s actually going on in Zoom.

The near-impossibility of joint attention in Zoom is most obvious when you try to jointly attend to anotherpersonover Zoom. Because you and your Zoom mates don’t all share a physical space—you’re all confined to separate virtual boxes, arrayed differently across each of your physical screens—you cannot point to someone, look at them, or even orient your body towards that person, in any way that can indicate to a third Zoom mate that you are attending to that person in particular.

This means that watching, listening, and attending more generally become private and individual matters over Zoom, instead of the shared activities they become in person. In person, someone gazing towards something automatically pulls your attention towards it. But over Zoom, other people’s gazes simply do not motivate you to pay attention to whatever they areactuallyattending to. You have to exert private effort of your own to stay on track, throughout the hours you spend on Zoom. You have to work harder, marshalling all your own resources not to float away into a daydream.

It is easy to forget, when we spend a lot of time around others, how difficult sustained private attention really is. This is part of the excellent and worthwhile challenge of mindfulness meditation, which I discussed on Part 2 of theComforting Conversationsepisode. It’s worth practicing this difficult skill, since you won’t have the ready help of others’ attention to shape your own while you’re sitting through all those exhausting Zoom sessions.

Image byAlexandra_KochfromPixabay