Selfie-consciousness and the Zoom camera

I recently learned how to hide yourself on Zoom. No, I’m not talking about turning off your camera – that’s something we all learned to do many months ago, whether to save bandwidth or to spare others the sight of our morning hair or living rooms. Rather, I’m talking about turning off the video of ourselves that we see by default whenever our camera is switched on.

In other words, I’m talking about letting others see you without having to see a constant reflection of yourself. Like, you know, how meetings used to be.

The ‘Hide Self View’ option, which can be found on a menu that comes up with a simple right-click on the main video screen (at least in Gallery mode – this article goes into the practicalities some more), was something I’d been meaning to look up for some time but hadn’t gotten round to. It’s not that it’s hard to figure out but simply that it’s easy to forget, probably at least in part because it seems to be the default. It’s also possible that I’m late to the party and many others have killed their selfie-videos long ago. But here, I am curious about whether it’s something that people notice, have stopped noticing and/or have taken for granted, and, most importantly, whether it distracts others as much as it distracts me.

Being an introvert, as well as somebody who would come stone last in any Best Poker Face competition, I’ve said many a silent prayer of thanks for being able to hide myself from others’ view at the click of a mouse. But if you think about it, this function by itself is a pretty bizarre kind of trickery from a social norms perspective – when last were you in a face-to-face meeting and could duck under the table any time you needed to either fix your teeth or grimace in horror at something your colleague just said?

And then we move from the oddity of being present-but-invisible to others, to that of being constantly visible to ourselves – never mind the oddity of seeing one another only as flat pixels on a screen. Isn’t it strange how we’ve gone from taking the occasional selfie to operating in selfie-mode almost full time? I will admit that I still haven’t even perfected the art of taking a good, now-old-fashioned selfie – perhaps exposing my (very) late-Millenial vintage.

I also still wonder about our habits of compulsively capturing reality through a lens in general. Among other things, photography lets us create memories of the places we visit; but the amount of camera snapping that people engage in at tourist sites, for example, seems to almost replace their direct experience of it. In fact, it seems to almost replace actual looking: people are effectively seeing the world through their screens, even while they’re in it. The worst instance of this for me was watching people turning their backs on the Western Wall in Jerusalem (which is considered disrespectful according to Jewish custom) in order to capture their faces in front of it.

I also remember visiting an art museum and noticing a man walking through with his camera essentially on motor-drive. He moved like a sort of bipedal version of the Google Maps car, a roving scanner. I didn’t envy the editing job he would have to do later, assuming he was in fact going to look at everything he’d captured. Our devices have become like an arms-length pair of glasses, archiving reality in real time.

Coming back to our online interactions, what are the advantages and disadvantages of being able to see yourself while talking to others? The main disadvantage is that seeing ourselves makes us self-conscious, and self-consciousness is distracting – let alone often cringeworthy, in these times of WFH. We see our face, and our attention is spontaneously drawn away from the conversation and to worries about ageing or thoughts about our next hair appointment. Now those glasses aren’t so rosy – they’re a hall of fun-house mirrors.

You could argue that this sort of distraction might in fact be helpful. For example, seeing our reflection may prompt us to be more conscious of whether we’re making enough eye contact and doing a good job of listening, or at least appearing to. We might even realise that our “neutral” listening face does not appear as open, warm and attentive as we might have thought, and can then work on improving this (although many of us may not exactly welcome this insight!). Or at the very least, it helps us notice that our cat has just moved into frame and is wreaking havoc on the couch behind us.

In short, one might argue that seeing ourselves can help us self-correct, and what’s wrong with that? After all, voice artists cannot record effectively without being able to hear not just the backing music but also themselves, so they can adjust their pitch in real time.

But the question is, what are we self-correcting against? Are we adjusting in response to the live human being in front of us and the conversation that’s currently taking place, or in response to what’s happening inside our heads, which that mirror so irresistibly redirects us to?

The mirror and the self-centering impulse   

We learn from early childhood to recognise ourselves in a mirror. This becomes automatic; more than that, it’s almost impossible to unlearn. We notice it only on those rare occasions when our eyes get ahead of our brains and play tricks on us: have you ever caught a glimpse of your reflection in a mirror before you realised that it was a mirror? For a split second, you see yourself as another person. But you can only do this for that fleeting instant before you recognise yourself and the illusion collapses.

With this in mind, is it even possible to see ourselves as others see us? The second we recognise our reflection, we are seeing what we think others are seeing. With this in mind, we are only ever correcting against self-judgment, not against what others really see.

Let’s go back to the above example of noticing and improving our “neutral/listening face”. The first problem is that (I’d be willing to bet) we are unlikely even to be able to have this insight, because once we catch a glimpse of ourselves, we self-adjust – instantaneously and all but unconsciously. Secondly, as I’ve said, we’d never know whether we were adjusting according to the other person’s needs, or simply to our own evaluation and expectations – especially if we just kept focusing on ourselves. It would be better to have somebody else tell us this feedback and show us a clip of our unsuspecting, unselfconscious selves going about the business of being with others.

In one of my previous blog articles, I considered that we can become self-conscious not only when we look at ourselves in a mirror, but when we look others directly in the eyes and in this way become aware of our “personhood”. It is almost as if seeing a returned gaze automatically prompts us to conjure up a projection of what that person must be seeing. The experience of self-consciousness, of having people’s eyes on us, may be positive or negative and must vary from person to person based on their experiences of others’ attention.

But in any case, I think many if not most of us would agree that self-consciousness comes at the cost of our being fully in the present moment. And so, if the true gift of being unselfconscious is to be fully present not just for ourselves but for others, we may need to go a step further than forgetting about the screen – we may in fact need to forget about ourselves.

How to disappear so that others can see you

Very importantly, I am not talking about feeling forgotten about or even invisible, “less than”, or unseen. I am not suggesting in this article that what we think of ourselves is not important. The point is rather that what we think about how others see us is not as important as the way they actually perceive us – or rather, how they perceive us perceiving them. “What others think about me” is, of course, all about us, and it shouldn’t matter in the moment. Besides, I think it’s much more likely that others perceive us favourably when we’re focused on them rather than on what we think we look like.

If we focus on our own appearance, we all but disappear to others. In forgetting ourselves, we do not disappear so much as make our interactions with others come fully alive. Put differently, perhaps, others will see you as much as you see them.

Self-consciousness is not in itself the enemy, and of course it isn’t something we can magically be cured of altogether. I also think it’s important to distinguish it from self-awareness and -insight, which unlike self-consciousness are vital to our growth and development. But the key point is that fixating on what we look like can get in the way of our connecting with others. This inward, selfie-focus is something we already know to be problematic, but it’s also something that technology seems to be prompting us to do more and more, and we need to be aware of that.

Remember that we never used to be able to see ourselves in meetings. Now that we can, does it feel hard to give it up? I haven’t yet tried Hide Self View and so this will be my challenge: next time I Zoom, I will try to Zoom outwards.

After checking my hair first, of course.