Comment by zmmmmm
3 years ago
Oddly I have found that switching nearly entirely to video meetings has helped me participate better, because it gives me "license" to interrupt. I'm culturally a hard-line non-interrupter. In person I will always wait until the other has finished speaking, collating a list of items to address with them (often forgetting them along the way). In video calls I have experienced a new sense of permissiveness where I find it's much easier to jump into the middle of a conversation. I'm not sure if it's because everybody is waiting that extra few hundred ms due to latency, or if it's purely a psychological difference of not being face to face with them in person, or knowing that people will be judging me less harshly because it's plausible I'm interrupting due to latency rather than out of disrespect for what they are saying.
I know this is opposite to the experience for many others who I assume have an easier time with in-person interactions because they feel very natural going with the conversation flow.
This is the opposite as my experience. I find it hard to interrupt or even interject over zoom because it’s so hard to time.
Yep, too often the lag transforms an interjection into an interruption.
I've noticed the same thing. In in-person conversation, I'm usually slow on the draw when it's time for the next person to speak, and if I'm with interrupters, they almost always beat me to it. But in video calls, the extra round trip of lag gives me just enough quiet to signal that it's my turn to talk, so I don't get shut out quite as much. Even if someone else is quicker on the draw, I've already started talking, so I don't just instinctively shut up when I hear another person going first.