Ethnography of Video Calls, Through Video Calls (2/n)
Because a video call is an ethnographic field that disappears the moment you leave it.
Lets call this part two- my positionality as an ethnographer in my virtual “field”, my research methods and the peculiarities of my “field” of work.
Missed out on Part 1: The motivation and the objective? Click to visit!
Quick Recap: My objective is to study the coexistence of private physical spaces in the shared virtual space of Video Calls through- one, the corresponding new behaviours if any, that college students in Delhi exhibit and two, adaptations, if any, that they have had to make.
I adopt a reflexive outlook in this ethnographic writing. I am a student myself, and I am researching something in which I am actively involved. I am thus a stakeholder in my own research. I cannot “distance” or “dissociate” myself from this research work and writing. While in the scientific community, much effort is spent making the research and writing as “objective” as possible, I instead spend time making it interpretive. I think pretty much everyone knows that there is no one “truth” in social sciences. Whatever I observe and write will carry my habitus, motivations and ambitions into it. Best be reflexively candid about it.
Where do I stand in this?
As a student, I have been immersed in this shift since the past 9 months, from relying on physical spaces to virtual spaces, a shift in which I am not alone. During this time, I have adopted multiple roles, roles that I employ ahead in my methods. Academic roles include an active student, a passive student, a Teaching Assistant, a project lead, a co-worker, a student researcher in a lab and a conference attendee. Social roles include a friend, a family member, a mediator for arguments and conflicts, an organiser of events and a friend of a friend.
As I have experienced (and on a few occasions, imagined), most of these roles feel different in physical spaces. I would be experiencing different roles at different spaces- a student in a classroom, a lab researcher with fancy virtual reality equipment, a midnight conflict mediator at the hostel rooms and a friend of a friend at the canteen.
In the virtual setting, these social roles occur at a single “space”- a software application over my laptop or my phone on my work desk in my room. The space of this interaction, physically, is the size of the device’s screen that I am using.
I thus have a personal stake in exploring this problem- it is not just to construct knowledge, but also to understand and interact with the larger narrative. Are these things that only I am curious about? Do my peers experience any friction or pressures online? Can we compensate, if not find a solution for these? Can we start a dialogue within the student community itself, and possibly find ways to alleviate a diminishing sense of companionship? With an objective in mind, I set out to do an exploratory ethnographic study, guided initially by my own experiences and the experiences shared with me by those in my personal network.
To study this coexistence of private physical spaces in virtual spaces of video calls, I focus my attention to the undergraduate students at IIITD. As an undergraduate student at the same institute, I have inhabited the same physical spaces for the past 3 years. I am undergoing similar institutional processes in the shift to virtual, thus having a deep understanding of the shift’s contexts. I have built a strong rapport with many informants here, and have built strong and weak ties. I am an active participant in many social circles- circles which interact primarily through text, and on occasion, will set up video calls.
To study private spaces in video calls, I feel that being a part of a close-knit community is essential to understand their dynamics and thought processes and make sure that my presence as a “stranger” is minimised. Thus, as an ethnographer, I can have access and participate without causing discomfort in these student communities.
Methods
I employ the methods of observation, semi-structured interviews and participant observation for this study. Video calls are an opportunity where one can be an observer, as well as an active participant. For this project, I write about my observations and participation for one week. However, I take the liberty of writing about my experiences before that period reflexively.
For the calls where I had an intent to observe and participate for research, I let the participants on the Video Call (VC) know about this intention, and report the observations after their verbal consent. Four interviews were taken one-on-one on a call with participants (M=3, F=1) who consented to grant me around 40 minutes of their time. The interviews were semi-structured, based on the themes of space, background, sounds, noise and family presence in VCs.
My inquiry focuses on the virtual spaces manifested on laptop screens through software like Meet and Zoom. All the participants across calls were undergraduate students at a technical institute and came from similar socio-cultural backgrounds; lived in North India for the past 5 years or more and coming from an upwardly mobile middle-class students families.
- Most of them have mid to upper range laptops and smartphones, which are powerful enough to support video calling applications, and have good cameras.
- They have access to largely uninterrupted and unrestricted high-speed internet.
- The participants are pursuing a technical education in computer science and related fields, and thus have an active working knowledge and familiarity with technology.
- Pre-pandemic, most of the participants lived in the college hostels, visiting their families for a day or two a week. The participants who were not hostellers spent about 10 hours on-campus for 5 days a week.
These participants now lived with their families and in most cases, had a room for themselves or shared one with a sibling. The structure of their families was not homogenous across participants. While this may impact their behaviours, interactions and moods, I use the word families as a unit and acknowledge that this is a factor that is worthy of exploration in the future. Occasionally, I may break away from this unit and attribute different family members and their roles as and when significant.
The Peculiarities of this Fieldwork
This method of digital participatory observation is rather peculiar, because the field space of VCs is not something that exists permanently, or is public. It is not someplace that I can shadow people in, and is not someplace where people live.
Rather, this space is set up on mutual agreement between the participants and is temporary. It does not exist before the interaction, and it does not exist after unless recorded.
Thus, observation here- participatory or not, is not a process where I can go unnoticed and lurk around gathering details. The participants are aware of my presence, before the call- when it is being set up, and during the call through the user interface of the video calling applications. Even if my video is turned off, my name remains visible as a visual reminder- in the call’s participant list or on their screen itself.
Thus, I cannot afford the anonymity, or realistically for this college, I am a part of, the diminished presence offered by the public spaces where social interactions between students happen.
Ironically, the absence of anonymity is something I have observed occurs only in small groups of the sizes I intend to study- of about 4–12 students. For larger groups, especially classrooms, I have observed that anonymity is afforded more easily than it would have been in an offline setting. These large groups, however, are not in my focus. Meeting and interacting with small groups of strangers has become a challenging task itself. To construct these virtual spaces so that the participants do not seem intruded on by a third party is another reason I recruited them from my network.
This does not mean that my rationale is perfect, and this is where I especially invite your feedback. Since I recruit people I am familiar with, and I come from similar backgrounds and carry similar dispositions, I inherently need to be more reflexive to observe. Studying people I am familiar with while giving me a sense of understanding of their perspectives, may introduce bias in sample selection. I am conscious of this bias. I have recruited participants purposively; I have interviewed students I know are introverts and extroverts. I acknowledge that for a more rigorous study, I will need to adopt a better sampling strategy and more participants for the interviews. I rely on my experience and awareness to observe reflexively. I invite discourse to help me understand the gaps and biases I may have introduced.
For the participatory observations and passive observations, my role is that of a friend in varying degrees of closeness with the fellow students on call. The power dynamics in these calls are somewhat similar to what I have observed offline but have definitely evolved over time. I can trace some of these evolutions because I have been a part of the process; some felt newer. However, I argue that these dynamics will always evolve, and I persuade myself to not make a distinction here. In classroom spaces and office hours that I hold, these dynamics definitely do matter. Still, in social interactions with the intent of catching up, meetings and chatting, I treat these as a part of the natural part of the interaction. I do not actively dwell on how it affects interactions and new behaviours.
During the interviews, I adopt the role of the interviewer and consciously try my best to diffuse the feelings of interrogation and intrusion by building rapport. For the conversations with groups of people of at least four, I adopt the method of observation and participatory observation.
To extend conversations or follow up, I often had to break the call’s immersion, which resulted in a change of mediums- primarily to text, and a shift in the synchrony of the conversation- mainly due to response time gaps.
These methodological peculiarities were challenging. As someone who has conducted fieldwork in physical spaces, it feels alien to not have a similar sensorial and synchronous immersion. Much of the ethnographic studies employ heavy physical immersion and in-person interactions. Thus, navigating these feelings, and these challenges are quite an experience, which is precisely why I felt I needed to write about this. This is my take on tackling these challenges, but I think there is a lot more to learn.
Armed with a determination to tackle these challenges, I went ahead reflexively, attending scheduled calls while sitting on my desk with a notepad on the side, scribbling down notes and participating, and following up on conversations with text.
I think this is a good place to end this piece. In the next one, I’ll present some composite narratives that I have constructed to write my findings and observations- stories where I try to capture my understandings and interpretations of the events. Hopefully, you’ll enjoy it!
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 reflection on this work. Research Methods have never been so interestingly ambiguous. Say hello to me on LinkedIn!
