Gahh. I don’t like doing Zoom stuff at all. I hate it, in fact.
I’ve participated in a few Zoom meetings, and I find the videos so distracting. It’s like a screen full of animated gifs (which I also dislike), with most people seemingly unaware that they’re on video. How can they not know? Yet I see them eating, chewing gum, nodding off, tilting back so I just see the top of their head, operating a sewing machine right next to the camera so we see this giant moving hand filling the window, crying, fooling with the dog, laughing at some other website, and even (once) going to the bathroom.
And forgetting to mute the slurping, munching, etc.
They would not be doing this in a real meeting. They would at least be pretending to pay attention, and they would be keeping the slurping to a minimum.
It does seem to suit people who like having an audience, but I’m not one of them, at least not in terms of live performance. I swear some of them are actually playing to the audience instead of just making their contribution to the meeting.
I don’t want to appear onscreen, so I don’t enable the video. I enable the audio but keep it on mute and don’t say a word. Three months now and I haven’t spoken in a meeting. Some people are wondering if I’m growing a killer backlog of opinions.
Yes, I know. I’m still not ready for the twentieth century. So write me a letter on paper and I’ll answer it in two weeks.