It is interesting to me how many video conference apps default to showing you your whole camera the entire time. It's useful to check a video preview for anything egregious in the space around you, but as a constant source of background noise while you talk? Even without body dysmorphia issues, it seems like a attention/focus problem. Of course it makes dysmorphia issues worse.

I have been working to always turn that preview camera off, because I find it distracting and because of dysmorphia issues. It's differently complicated in every video conference app. It seems obvious to me at this point that should be the default behavior. I don't understand why it is not.

The solution is to not stream video.

Most zoom calls can easily be an email ;)

While I fundamentally agree with you, this sadly is not really a possibility for me as a consultant.

LoB wants to speak face to face. They want presentations and for things to be explained in bite-sized chunks. Leaders don’t want to approve things via email, because then one person has to be the first one disagreeing or accepting.

It’s much easier to seek consensus in a room, or on a call. “The committee has decided to…”. “The SLT did not appear in favour of…”.

Authority, without the individual responsibility. Laurels, without the risk. It’s a disease that grows like a cancer across many enterprises. SAFe and others are not helping, either, by promoting this type of decision making.

I do consultancy too, and I rarely turn my video on. I certainly appreciate that some folk are prone to want video on though.

I'm blessed to not have clients like that!

Oh, I very rarely turn on my video (I only have video enabled when I’m on-site with a client). I guess I conflated “video calls” with “meeting culture”.

No worries. Meeting culture is still... Awful... video or not :)

It is common and widespread for performers and professionals to have a means of feedback. For example, in a studio or concert, musicians use "foldback" or monitor speakers to hear themselves play or sing. In television studios, there are broadcast reference monitors for engineers and on-screen performers to get an idea of what the cameras see. Even POTS telephones have "sidetone", and most of us find it eerie or uncomfortable when these cues are missing.

The good news for you is the ability to turn that feature off! So what's the complaint?

From my understanding the POTS "sidetone" was a hack around handsets/headsets that too effectively blocked other sounds. What people really want are "transparent" headsets that don't block too many other sounds in the space the person occupies, or block only the "wrong" sounds.

I've watched enough musicians do sound checks to know that monitors are often more for hearing other parts of the band for coordination. Common requests are to lower the volume on their own instruments or eliminate their own instruments/voice from the mix in their monitor and stronger highlight their rhythm section or harmonies.

While television studios have had all sorts of reference monitors, no one ever called film and movie studios "unprofessional" and they still call their playback/reference monitors "dailies" for a lot of good reasons, even now that they aren't shooting on actual film anymore and they don't need to wait for film prints at the end of the shooting day anymore.

It's not unprofessional to want to avoid immediate, rough feedback and prefer an executive summary at the end of the day, even if the technology exists to do things immediately.

> The good news for you is the ability to turn that feature off! So what's the complaint?

Good news, there's an entire linked article here that includes many of the complaints. Partial, poor tl;dr: there is a rising mental health battle happening because of such "default features" of constant self-camera monitoring. The article here includes several strong reasons it should make more sense to default these features to off and let people opt-in to them rather than opt-out. General mental health and wellbeing is a good enough reason to change defaults. Also, in the comment you replied to with sarcasm, I added the complaints that even if these default on features weren't deleterious to mental health, they are distractions that often impact people's focus and attention spans in meetings. I also think that's a strong reason to default these features off, though it is still a lesser reason than the mental health issues.

This. If I'm talking to someone, I want to see his face and his reactions. The default "show whoever is talking in big" makes zero sense when you are talking.

I would love a "preview" view that just let you know where you are in the frame of your camera, and maybe warns if you're getting out of bounds. Give me the general sense of my placemen but don't make me stare at myself!

I go days (sometimes low number of weeks, maybe) without seeing my own face. It's not very deliberate; I just rarely have reason to see my own face. Anyone else or am I an outlier?

You don't own a mirror or use public facilities with mirrors?

There's a mirror in the bathroom, but it's not over the sink. I'd have to deliberately look in it, and I just don't.

“Looking at neural pathways in our brain, viewing our own image activates an area of the brain called the fusiform face area, which processes facial recognition. This can heighten self-awareness and self-consciousness,” she explains. This of course can be great for development, but Baker adds that constant self-viewing may amplify self-criticism and fixation on our physical appearance.

“We become attuned to every angle and detail, losing perspective. Without healthy boundaries, it can feed an obsession with self-image,”

From noting that looking at your face activates the bit of the brain that recognises faces, they derived all that?

The article mentions TikTok and has some mention to filters, but falls into the trap of putting the onus on our own decision-making. In reality if you've ever spent more than half an hour on TikTok lately you know that people are starting to realise how little our agency comes into play. In fact we don't "see our own faces" at all in so many cases; even putting aside the natural distortion of a camera, software (especially on social media) distorts this much further. It's truly grim that the person you're used to seeing on your own feed is radically different (and more "perfect" according to some very dubious senses of the word) than the one you see in the mirror. I can only speak for myself in how deleterious this has been on self-esteem, but I imagine I'm not alone.