It is true that for many it may be “more comfortable” to have the camera turned off. It is one thing to have it with coworkers with whom you share on a daily basis and whom you have known physically since before the pandemic; It is quite another to do it with strangers or with people with whom you must create a relationship of trust.
Some people emphasize that mirroring and seeing themselves all the time is exhausting. But that is easy to solve, it is enough to disable this function in the software that is used.
In terms of human communication, 90% of personal life exposure is preferable, rather than visualization override. Everyone at some point, for some reason, we need two or five minutes of cameras off, but that cannot be the status quo. It is not good that it is.
Especially because for many of our interlocutors, the camera turned off is a sign of contempt and we do not want to be connected with that feeling to our small audiences.
As a consultant, I provide daily Storytelling and communication seminars in various languages for international companies. If the participants do not have their cameras turned on, I miss out on a lot of very rich information for me and for the process of improving those executive profiles. Through the gestures of the faces, I can tell if I was unclear or if a participant got lost in an explanation.
With the camera turned off, the empathy of a smile evaporates in the face of a comment I made. Without seeing them, the interaction is pulverized.
I lose, for example, the connection with that mother who is with her four-year-old son dressed in his spider-man costume in her arms, whom I can integrate into the conversation by asking his name and creating a space of trust with his mother, who now he feels that he does not have to try to hide the difficulties of his family life. If she feels like she doesn’t have to hide things in front of me, well then it can be. And that’s what I want the most: for it to be.
It is possible that in the next session, I will ask him how “spider man” is, of which I now know the name: we are already much more connected. If I work on Storytelling issues it is because I am interested in stories and the camera is my chance to see more stories of my interlocutors: if they drink a smoothie, if they have a plant that I like, etc.