‘Clear as mud…’ (Considering telephone conference calls)

A telephone conference takes all the participants’ voices and squishes them together. Ideas can be communicated and action steps decided etc, but later it’s really hard to recall who was who, and who said what during the call.

The joys of a conference call...

Philip Rosedale, founder of Second Life gave a talk in April of this year to the Gronstedt Group in Second Life. During this talk he described his frustration with telephone conference calls:

“Think about when you are sitting at a meeting using a speaker phone, and you are staring at that speaker, and then after a while you become frustrated because you think; ‘Why am I looking at this stupid phone’, and you try to look at the other people but that feels really awkward, so you look at the ceiling. Then you kind of give up in frustration and maybe look back at the phone.”

Philip Rosedale then added that our brain localizes “the voices that it hears as being little tiny humans that are sitting somehow inside that phone… If there are multiple people at the end of your line your brain images them all as being trapped inside that little phone, and that’s really unpleasant because two people (or more) are right in the exact same space. When they are speaking to you from the same place… your brain has a hard time.” (Rosedale, 2009).

"...little tiny humans that are sitting somehow inside that phone…"

Philip Rosedale, Founder of Linden Labs. Gronstedt Group. Second Life.  April 2009. To hear more visit: http://www.gronstedtgroup.com/MP3s/Philip_Rosedale_Linden_Lab.mp3

(Post update: Friday May 29. Image showing tiny humans trapped inside phone added as a lacy kerchief wave to Dusan’s post titled Philipisms #7 – Get Those Tiny Humans Out of Your Head)

Goldfish Attention Loops and Webinars…

Webinars tend to be dull to look at and tedious to listen to. They largely depend upon the skills of a moderator who hopefully has an engaging voice (qualities that are often lacking). Webinars also tend to be formulaic and predictable and, as my last post observed, they are rather sorry objects to look at. The poor visual quality of webinars goes a long way towards explaining our  ensuing attention drift and poor memory recall.

An attempt to show the movement of attention when viewing the two-dimensional webinar screen.The red arrows indicate the short 'attention loop' generated by webinar viewing.

This short visual attention loop is very similar to the movement pattern of a goldfish swimming in a fish tank. The fish swims from one end of the tank to the other, as it reaches the end it bumps into the glass wall of the aquarium, and turns  to swim to the opposite end of the tank. It then meets the glass wall at this end of the tank and swims back, and so on, ad infinitum. (Does the fish’s brain contain enough memory to know it has been to the end of the tank and back already?)

The Goldfish Attention Loop

In the case of humans staring at a relatively unchanging computer screen, the low demand of the webinar ‘goldfish attention loop’ triggers us into finding something more visually stimulating  to look at.  Based purely on anecdotal evidence it is well known that people open up their email while ‘attending’ an online meeting or training. Others simply carry on working, making phone calls or chatting to colleagues.

Now, when we look at the 3D environment of a virtual world depicted upon our computer screen our eyes can peer into a synthetic distance. This gives us the illusion of space and by adding the visual representations of familiar objects, we can create an ambiance, or mood, to this virtual meeting space. These extra peripheral visual details plus the use of additional ambient sound effects assist concentration and we end up remembering more as a result!