Am I too old for video conferencing?

I have done a lot of video conferences lately. This is not the "am I too old" bit. I know we've all done a lot of that for the last few years.

I am good at knowing when to turn on my camera and microphone. I know how to turn them off if I'm having lunch during a mandatory meeting (because no one wants to watch anyone eat a salad). Here's where I get to my question.

WHY AM I WAVING AT THE SCREEN?

I caught a glimpse of myself yesterday and it made me gasp.

I looked like Forrest Gump waving at Lieutenant Dan on the dock. Definitely a vibe. Definitely not the one I want to give strangers. It gives a little too much, "I'm friendly and you can probably take advantage of me." I'd like to present a little more Lizzo, like, "go ahead and try me because I'll beat you at your game and write a song about it and when I win a Grammy you'll wish you hadn't."

I mentioned this to a few friends and, like me, they do it and wish they could stop. We don't do that in person so why is it something we feel like we need to do?

First, I will tell you why I think I do it. I just don't trust the internet to have my audio on even when I have told my computer to let people hear me. I wave and say "hello" and "goodbye" as a visual to the person on the other side of the screen. In person, I know you can see and hear me so it's not necessary to wave at you - except maybe if I'm trying to sneak in or out of a meeting and I want to make sure you know.

Second, I tend to give myself a little pep talk before things. I might say, "Hey, why don't you try to be cool and don't geek out like you haven't seen another human in years?" I keep it super real with myself. I don't need to sugar coat it. Then, the second someone says, "Can you see me?" I'm channeling my inner Forrest. I can tell you I definitely do not summon him when I am on the treadmill so I don't know why this is when I need him.

I turned to the internet and found that this is actually a full thing. People have been writing about it since COVID made us all download Zoom. In fact, some even call it The Zoom Wave. Here are some of the reasons we do it:

• It's polite. “It creates not only a sense of closure and alignment but is also, for some, a signal of respect and acknowledgment: valuing others for their time, their engagement with us.”
• We miss people. “We’re hungering for that human interaction, that friendliness, so we’re starting to do things like waving to say goodbye. It feels a little nicer than just clicking off.”
• We are SO basic. “When we were in preschool, […] because children couldn't read all of our verbal cues, we would use body cues to signal that we were leaving. In a similar way, we're kind of like in the pre-school phase of Zoom still. We are waving […] to reinforce what we really mean. And I think what was implicit in traditional body language now has to be explicit in digital body language.”

Generally, the articles I found said it should not be awkward. It's an evolution of digital communication. While we would not wave to end an in-person meeting, gathering our things and standing up at the same time would be a clear cue that the meeting is over. If you stand in front of your camera instead of waving, it's a crotch shot and no one wants to see that (especially important if you're only appropriately dressed from the waist up). If you just end a meeting without a wave, it will leave the others wondering if there was a technical glitch and they may spend a lot of time trying to open another meeting room and hunt you down and when you don't respond 9-1-1 gets called and then you'll realize the weird wave would have prevented all of this.

So I will keep waving. Or maybe I will write a note that has some cool sign off. I just have to figure out how to write backwards. Wait. That's old person thinking. I need to make a slide and ask to share my screen with my video sign off. When I get really advanced computer skills, I'll make a hologram that has me moon-walking right off their work spaces. Wait. Moon-walking is probably not the modern move I want to flex. Maybe I'm not too old for video conferencing. I'm just too old for modern references? 👵