Focus Pocus

Cheers to the staring contests we hold with our screens! An early goodbye to the utility of eye contact.

Photo by Vinicius "amnx" Amano on Unsplash

My old Muay Thai coach insisted that you sense everything by looking at your opponent directly in the eyes. The philosophy was this: there is a deeper tension to clasp, beyond the intensity of two opponents fighting in a ring, and most importantly, locking it in through the eyes granted power to your physical technique, your approach and even your style. Something about the connection was innate to our primal, natural instincts, so that’s what made it vital. If my teammates and I were ever caught with our eyes adrift during sparring, we were egregiously reprimanded. It was a lazy mistake, as stupid as if we couldn’t keep our hands up and let our fists dangle by our knees instead.

I have been thinking more and more about eye contact lately, but, mostly of the general, everyday kind. Perhaps, because I live in the Zoom world and am part of the laptop class, or perhaps, because I’m growing further away from the age which believes in the potential within every individual to develop into your next best friend, but when it comes to making genuine eye contact with an acquaintance, I struggle to care. It could be some combination of these things or something I haven’t thought to put to words, but really, I’m not willing to make undivided, extended eye contact with anyone that I don’t already know personally. I love to hold my dog’s gaze for as long as he’ll withstand it, though. I suppose this is the baseline: eye contact is for those whom I already love, or, for anyone I’m willing to make some kind of an exchange with. Let me explain.

Eye contact is just like tennis. During a match, every strike of the ball is both offensive and defensive at once. Each player sends and receives simultaneously, and they cannot carry out one without the other. This is how eye contact works, too. It is exhausting and invigorating; altogether, every moment can be transformative.

Take every clerk or service person we interact with in a day, for example. When they’re delivering a cup of coffee or scheduling my next dental cleaning, I hold their gaze with steadfast intention. There are two things happening here: there’s some transaction of information or sale of goods, and also, the service of it all. It is an honest and pleasant way to get exactly what you are after, but it does take something out of you. Think about the last time you had a heart-to-heart with someone you cared about. A lot can happen in a single conversation, and if there were some equalizing metric, you probably shared more eye contact than you did words. And, hypothetically, if you had not held each other’s gaze as much, those few words would not have afforded the conversation such catharsis, such transformational power.

This is me interpreting common sense, but I think there is a very utilitarian way to look at all of this, and I’d like to make the point that technologists understand this very well. I tuned in to the Joe Rogan podcast the other day when I saw that Mark Zuckerberg was his guest because they spoke for nearly 3 hours. That’s a long time to hold up a corporate face, and I was curious to see if he would break his persona and show us who he really is. Unsurprisingly, Zuckerberg is doggedly rehearsed.

When he wasn’t using plural pronouns to explicate his own decisions at Facebook, he talked about his personal love of surfing, and for learning new sports and doing fun stuff out in the real world. The irony here is obvious, so I’ll go ahead point to it: one of today’s most powerful technologists either spends his time imposing tools on us which bastardize our humanity, or catching a wave and honoring the natural joys of real, physical life.

Zuckerberg talked about the technology he’s building to make video calls more life-like. He noted how, during a Zoom call, we don’t actually make eye contact because we technically can’t. My ears perked up. My colleagues were just knocking someone for staring off away from the computer during an important call. Honestly, I do the same when I’m focused on articulating myself—it helps me to get the words out precisely. Of course, it was funny to me because as engineers, my colleagues should well understand that wherever we’re looking, we’re all just talking heads on Zoom anyway. None of us are actually making eye contact—it’s a farce. What we are referring to when we are referring to eye contact, has slid into a new kind of truth about the world we live in. That we’ve given up genuine eye contact and have mistaken it for staring at a screen instead.

If Zuckerberg succeeds in his mission of making a video call feel more like an in-person conversation, what he’ll do is flatten all conversations equally. Can you imagine holding the gaze of your bartender exactly as you might your dying uncle, or the solicitor at your door, or your prying boss? It would be the zoomiest Zoom call, or, way too close.

Why do technologists always seem to miss the context? Maybe because the big ones today are copycat artists, actually. They look around themselves, then turn to the digital world claiming they’ve made an improvement or (it’s clichéd at this point) solved a problem. That’s why so much tech criticism often uses the same words creators do in the description of their goals: real, or life-like. So much of the digital stuff out there today collapses nuance and sucks joy, all in an effort to make one thing better. Tinder took romance out of dating. Amazon took anticipation out of delivery. Facebook weaponized interpersonal relations and they’ll do it again.

All this is as predictable as his refusal to speak for himself in regards to his choices as a businessman (Mark Zuckerberg: CEO first, human being second). Outside of his adorations on surfing, he was as unnatural as someone wearing a headset over their eyes playing sports. Necessity is the motherhood of invention, so they say, and in this case the necessity is staying competitive and paying the bills. The other obvious irony here is that the technology he has a hand in will march on no matter what—it will come from him or from anyone else who gets to market first. So, our task then, is to know what’s coming and what it will take from us as it finds its own path of integration. I’ll call this one early: get ready for even weirder eye contact that we’ll eventually call connection.   

The interesting thing I’ve learned about eye contact in martial arts is that where I place my eyes impacts what I do, and how I express my technique. When I stare down my opponent, I march them down, too. I’m bold and offensive in my approach, I throw every punch I want to and keep the pressure on. The problem here is that I get caught and I cannot see it coming—I usually walk right into a straight kick or something without any impulse to defend myself. It’s as if the stare down overrides my observational skills completely. I’m only speaking; there is no listening. But when I rest my eyes on my opponents collar bone or chin (the traditional way), I’m very observant and studious, my approach is considered and strategic. My defense is far more successful, and although I’m altogether less aggressive, I see more opportunities to land effective shots.

I’ve been working to integrate this nuance into my Muay Thai strategy I suppose, that’s how I’ve chosen to move on from this feedback. Like everything I do at the gym and in real life, it’ll be some kind of process and challenge in sorting out how to operationalize something like eye contact in my technique: when to stare down and when to reel back and observe. Maybe it can ultimately feel natural, determining how I want to connect with my opponent in our exchanges. But someone tell Zuckerberg: connection isn’t all that fun when it’s the goal of technology.