Originally published at: Plastic surgeons say the pandemic has caused "Zoom dysmorphia" | Boing Boing
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FWIW, I leave my camera on but turn my own view of it off during Zoom calls. I’ve found that it really helps with fatigue while keeping me “present” in meetings. YMMV.
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Reading stuff like this makes me happy to be a narcissist (at least according to friends and family). The more I look at myself the more I’m convinced I’m dang pretty.
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Same. I see enough of myself in the mirror, and it took me forty years to stop thinking “you ugly” and start thinking “not bad, Poindexter… not bad at all.” Turning off the Zoom see myself feature has made meetings a lot more relaxing (as far as meetings can be at least).
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The surgeons have obviously not had too many MS Teams users as customers. It does not mirror the image, and is universally unflattering. I have deep respect for those who manage to look good on MS Teams meetings.
I wish my Van Dyke looked as good IRL as it does on a shitty webcam… the rez is just low enough to hide the wispiness.
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Invest in a ring light, an HD webcam and a good microphone, rather than plastic surgery. That’s the beauty of videoconferencing: you can look better than in real life.
Personally I have started running LUTs simulating vintage film stock for that cinematic look
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Teams is just terrible in so many ways. We’ve tested Webex, Zoom, Teams, and a few others in the past year and a half. We ditched Webex completely for Zoom, but some of our clients setup meetings with us on Teams, and I despise it. Just so cludgy in comparison, even if it CAN do more. More is not always better.
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Looking at myself on Zoom was fine, BUT… once I viewed a recording of an event where my image wasn’t “mirrored” and I saw how I look to everyone else. That was startling. Apparently one side of my mouth droops really far down and it’s not apparent from my own view of myself. Also my glasses are way crooked.
I said at the beginning of this that constant Zoom meetings were going to give us all new body image issues and lo and behold.
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Just saw a clip about this on the Daily Show.
‘Interesting’ times, they say…
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My poor mother has a serious case of this. She’s a math tutor who switched over to Skype tutoring during the pandemic. Now she goes on and on and on about how awful she looks, the poor thing. I used to wonder why she started complaining about her appearance all of a sudden, but it does make sense now.
Me, I know I’m an ugly monster, so Zoom hasn’t given me any new information here.
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Yeah, not a fan of Teams for IM/voice either. So clunky and we get so many weird spam calls now that they ported our office numbers to Teams. I hate it so much that I now send all Teams calls straight to voicemail. Anyone I want to talk to has multiple other ways to reach me anyway.
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FWIW, I just turn the motherfucker off entirely. My voice is enough. I didn’t sign up to be a fucking talking head. Fuck em.
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I don’t notice it on work video meetings, probably because I’m sitting up straight, in my chair, at my desk. But facetime chatting on the couch, that view reminds me to use the firming neck cream. Just a bit of tilt is all it takes to see the future, of my neck at least.
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This is such a weird thing. I’m not bad looking, but I’ve never been very photogenic. I usually opt to dial in to meetings and find it annoying when people insist on everyone having their cameras on.
I do like the option others have posted about turning off your own view of yourself. I’m going to give that a try.
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One thing which escapes too many people’s notice: having the video feed on costs a lot of energy!
We’re talking cpu power (encoding/decoding), display power, transmission power. Here’s a quote from a study from Purdue University: https://impact-festival.earth/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Overlooked-Environmental-Footprint-of-Increasing-Internet-Use_2021_compressed.pdf
“Similarly, a standard videoconferencing service uses about 2.5 G/hr (see Supplementary Material) and has a carbon footprint of 157 g
CO2e/hr. If one were to have 15 1-hour meetings a week, their monthly
carbon footprint would be 9.4 kg CO2e. Simply turning off the video,
however, would reduce the monthly emissions to 377 g CO2e. This
would save the emissions of charging a smart phone each night for over
3 years (1151 days). If 1 million videoconference users were to make this
change, they would collectively reduce emissions by 9023 t of CO2e in
one month, the equivalent emissions of powering a town of 36,000
people for one month via coal.”
And there’s a water footprint etc etc etc.
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I haven’t looked yet but would be curious to see how this is all playing out, as in, has remote working led to an overall reduction in our water footprint/carbon footprint, whatever environmental metric we want to use, and how much of a “take back effect” are we seeing (it’s not quite the right term, but it kind of fits) due to stuff like the increased energy use in teleconferencing…
I don’t commute everyday, but in a normal 18 month period, I would’ve flown to at least 6 - 10 different states for work stuff.
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