You and your weird face on Zoom — Healthy Happy Homeworking

I remember in my early days of part-time journalism, conducting interviews, not with tech entrepreneurs at that time but mostly small indie bands, using a little Dictaphone complete with miniature cassettes. There were no smart apps like Otter to push the recording through afterwards to generate a transcript either, so my work involved listening back to capture the best quotes emerging from the not always stunningly articulate subject. It sometimes took quite a bit of fast-forwarding and rewinding.

I enjoyed listening to those tapes, and wonder what happened to some special recordings, but one thing I know I always hated: hearing my own voice. I sounded weird, completely different to how I sounded in my own head when I spoke. I thought I knew my own voice really well, I’d been listening to it all my life, but this flat tinny sound coming from the little mono speaker was completely different.

I felt much the same about photos of me at the time, I recall. I was always much more comfortable behind the camera, because what I saw on the print didn’t resemble what I thought I knew, and that made me deeply uncomfortable

Fast-forward (retro callback!) to the 2020s, and I think we all know what we look like.