Status Report on Group Video Call Face
The person has developed a face for video calls. It is not their regular face. It is a managed face, held in place by sustained awareness that the camera is on.
Status Report: Group Video Call Face, Current Condition and Maintenance Burden
Correspondence addressed to no particular party
Current Status
The face is operational. It has been in use since approximately March 2020 and has been refined through several hundred hours of active deployment. It is characterized by a slight upward arrangement of the mouth corners, a positioning of the head that creates the impression of attentiveness, and a managed stillness that reads, the person believes, as composed engagement.
The face is not their face. It is a construct assembled from observations about how they appear on camera, feedback received over time, and an accumulated body of evidence suggesting that their natural resting expression reads differently on screen than it does in a room.
The face is not unpleasant. It is simply not the face the person has when they are not being looked at, which is the face they have for most of their life.
Observable Consequences
The first consequence is physical. Maintaining the face across a ninety-minute call requires a low-level muscular effort concentrated in the jaw, forehead, and lower eye area. The effort is not large. It is constant. After a day containing four calls, the person is tired in a way that is difficult to explain to people who have not experienced it.
The second consequence is perceptual. The person does not know what they look like on camera. They are looking at the screen, not the camera. The camera is above the screen. This means they are always looking slightly down, and their image, when self-viewed, shows them looking slightly down, which they correct by raising their gaze, which causes them to look at the camera instead of the people on screen, which creates a different problem.
The third consequence is social. Other people on the call are also maintaining faces. Everyone on the call is, to varying degrees, performing composed engagement for an audience of people who are also performing composed engagement. No one has discussed this. The calls are productive.
The Absurd Rule
Video conferencing software places each participant's own image in a small tile on the screen. This means that during calls, participants spend significant time looking at themselves. There is no equivalent in physical meetings. The effect of sustained self-observation on the quality of one's presence in the conversation has not been formally studied, but the person has a theory, which they have not shared with anyone, and which they return to often during calls, which means they are developing their theory while performing composed engagement.
The Contradiction
The person has been complimented on their presence in meetings. The compliments are sincere. The presence that is being complimented is the managed face, not the natural face. The natural face is available only to people in the same room, which is fewer people each year.
The managed face is now, in a functional sense, the public face. This is fine. The person has accepted this. They have accepted it during many video calls, with the managed face, while looking slightly down.