Ethnography of Video Calls, Through Video Calls (1/n)
Because when private physical spaces of people try to coexist virtually, conflict happens.
When COVID-19 closed off all physical spaces, most of the world pretty much shifted to the virtual spaces. Having a course on Advanced Ethnographic Research Methods this semester, it was imminent that “fieldwork” was not happening on the physical field. Thus, I decided to visit this virtual field of “video calls” to gather insight on how the “virtual space” of a video call has brought together multiple “physical spaces” of the participants of the call and the consequent emergence of behaviours and feelings.
I do not think it a good idea to narrate the entire thing in one article, so I’ll probably break it into a few parts? Let’s call this part one- the motivation and the objective.
Talking face-to-face, virtually
Video calls (VCs) are a mode of online interaction, where two or more people talk to each other, face to face, remotely. With advances in technology, infrastructure and high-speed internet, video calls as a technological means of communication have only increased, with high-quality videos transmitted from one device to another. The interaction is near-synchronous. The audio is also mostly synchronous with the video, creating a face-to-face interaction. Despite having technological limitations and jitter, VCs have largely transformed the way remote communication happens. While emails, chat messengers and VoIP facilitate remote communication with different degrees of synchrony and immersion, VCs elevate the experience through its affordance of seeing other people, in real-time.
Pre-Covid, VCs used to be the go-to medium for connecting with geographically distant colleagues, friends and relatives, through Skype and allied services. This medium, however, was limited in its application and use cases, I observe in retrospect. With the large-scale pandemic of Covid-19 rapidly closing down physical spaces and closed-space interactions, people and institutions have had to make a paradigm shift in the way meeting and socialising face to face happens- from physical spaces to virtual spaces.
Video calls are at the forefront of these virtual spaces, providing a limited subset of the affordances of in-person talk. It would be wrong of me to say that pre-covid, communication between people had been entirely in-person. Social media and text messengers have provided for a scalable sociality to connect and communicate with. The digital means of communication has only added to the ways people communicate, with theories of polymedia and media multiplexity emerging.
Thus, video calls themselves are not a new phenomenon; it is the scale at which the pandemic has led to the adoption of this online communication technology, that is new.
And in response to this phenomenon, technology has also scaled up and diversified, with the rise of Meet, Teams, Zoom and other video-conferencing applications designed for different use cases.
Social events that relied heavily on physical spaces- classes, weddings, “shok sabhas” and work meetings, are now being forced to be virtual in such a short time. I shift my focus to college students now, being one myself. With the colleges in Delhi indefinitely closed off, students in these spaces have lost access to many of what spaces constituted their college life.
As a student at IIITD, I experience the loss of these spaces myself. Academic spaces, libraries and classrooms have been lost or transformed into online spaces. However, it is not these spaces of academic productivity I am interested in. Rather it is the permanent shared spaces of student interaction and socialisation- the routes, the paths, the open seatings, the canteen, the mess, the hostels. Spaces that were shared, common and even public at times, where one could just walk in, see someone, make a conversation and leave at will.
These spaces provided a common physical context between people engaged in social activity. Space where the participants shared the physical location, the sounds, sights, smells of the environment, and factors like light, wind, and temperature. They may not share the exact same experiences, though. The proximity may be different, the sounds are directional, the sights are different from different points of view, and the perception of physical factors like wind and temperature may depend on the individual tolerance and clothing. However, what they experience is shared between them. In fact, it is almost public in many cases, with people in the near space, in close proximity also experiencing these factors.
With a shift to virtual spaces, like those afforded by video calls, we experience the coexistence of multiple private physical spaces in a shared virtual setting. While the video call itself is a shared virtual space with its various affordances, the view and properties of the respective webcams are not. What one sees and hears are their own physical backgrounds and sounds, and those of the other participants. And these spaces, increasingly, as people work from home, are private physical spaces. They could be rooms, backyards, dining tables- spaces that would not be a factor in an in-person conversation unless invited to them. These spaces of individual participants are all private living spaces with their own set of physical characteristics. From these characteristics, sights, sounds, noise, light and movement are some factors that can be relayed to the other participants of the video call. Thus, in this shared virtual space, there is this coexistence of these individual physical contexts, which are relayed virtually. These factors from these private spaces may conflict, or demand control in the shared virtual space.
My objective is to study this coexistence in the shared virtual spaces of VCs through- one, the corresponding new behaviours if any, that people exhibit and two, adaptations, if any, that they have had to make.
In the next piece, I’ll set the stage for this ethnographic work- my positionality, the methods and the peculiarity of the fieldwork: studying video calls… through video calls. Hopefully, you’ll find it interesting!
This series(?) is an adaptation of my mini-rapid-ethnography project for a course on Advanced Ethnographic Research Methods, Monsoon 2020. I’m a final year undergraduate student at IIITD, doing a lot of work in Human Computer Interaction. Say hello to me on LinkedIn!
