It has been interesting to watch over the last two pandemic years as the norms associated with videoconferencing have coalesced. My experience strongly suggests that the attention level expected on Zoom (and other videoconferencing platforms) is quite remarkably low — medieval-churchgoing low. Obviously, there will be exceptions to this norm — no one feels free to look away when the Boss is giving a speech — but I can’t remember the last time I was on a Zoom call in which participants were not regularly cutting their video and audio, or just their audio, to talk to people in the room with them. Or they just walk out of frame for a few minutes. Or they type away furiously on Slack or email or WhatsApp or iMessage. And no one who does this acts inappropriately, because such fidgeting and alternations of attention are permitted by the norms that have emerged.

It’s fascinating to me how these norms emerge. No one chooses them, they just happen; and when a lot of people are using one technology, they happen quickly. As I say in the essay, they also change, but they seem to change a lot more slowly than they emerge; and there’s nothing any one person can do to change them. When you’re a teacher, as I am, you have to be very observant about those attentional norms and choose the technologies that match your pedagogical purposes. Because you’re wasting your time if you try to enforce norms that are different than those people have absorbed from everyone else.

UPDATE: Everything I try to say here is said better by Rands: “Do you want to know why you’re fatigued at the end of a long day of video conferences? It’s because your brain has been straining to collect essential information that is no longer there.”