Ethnography of Video Calls, Through Video Calls (3/n)
Because nothing better than ethnographic stories to capture the complexity of the social.
Part 3- The Ethnographic Description and Thematic Insight.
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.
Read more on about my motivation and the objective in Part 1!
For this remote ethnographic study, I deploy the methods of Participant Observation, Observation and Interviews. I am a part of the field I want to research, and thus I adopt a reflexive view of ethnography to scaffold the insights gathered. My field is the virtual video calls, a rather peculiar site for fieldwork, because it is temporary, and does not offer me a diminished presence.
Read more about my positionality as an ethnographer in my virtual “field”, my research methods and the peculiarities of my “field” of work in Part 2!
In this piece, I’ll present the “composite narratives” that I have constructed to write my findings and observations to capture the rich ethnographic description. Following this, I will tie the insights using some themes that I intended to seek out, and some themes that emerged as I continued with the research, interacting and observing.
What is a composite narrative? A composite narrative is a story which captures the information from multiple sources. An aggregated story, much like that of a persona, but in much more depth. This helps me craft my many findings and overlapping patterns into cohesive, memorable stories of individuals representative of my sampled participants. Much like a good story, these narratives are great in capturing the “messiness” and the nuances of ethnographic data.
Let’s start!
Meet Vibhor
Vibhor is a 22-year-old undergraduate student, in his final year at a Technical Institute. He spent most of his time in college hanging out with his 3 closest friends- all guys, for assignments, food and chit-chat. Occasionally, Vibhor used to see some of his other friends on his way to and back the hostel, and often stood around to chat with them. He reminisces about the impromptu movie nights he used to have with his friends at the common room, and the birthday celebrations with cutting a cake and the shenanigans that followed. Vibhor was a hosteller for the past 2 years. Now, he spends all of his time at home, owing to the shift of college from physical to virtual. He shares a room with his younger brother, who is in school.
On typical weekdays, his father leaves home for work, and his mother spends the first half of the day with the domestic help, going about cleaning the house. Vibhor is annoyed, for the cleaning of his shared room often interrupts the classes he is attending. While Vibhor obliges with moving to the drawing-room for classes, he sets up more rigid boundaries for his smaller, more intimate project meetings where he has a personal stake. He directs his brother to sit elsewhere in the house and shouts to his mother from the room that he has a meeting, and asks her not to disturb him for an hour.
Following this, he locks the door, opens Google Meet on his laptop, combs his hair, and prepares to join the video call. He is careful to keep his mic off before joining. He is perched on the chair of his desk, the place where he says he spends most of his time these days. The webcam shows his face and the shiny wood-finished cupboards behind him. The tube light on the opposite wall is turned on and gives off a reflection from the cupboards visible in his video. While he does not like this, he says he has no alternative place to work and has made peace with this setting. Vibhor joins the call with earphones on, with his project partners who are also his friends. While usually they often digress, this time they have an upcoming deadline, and need to concentrate on work. He notices that their videos are off, and asks them to turn it on. Some of them refuse, saying that they do not look presentable for a video. Following this, the ones with videos on also turn off their videos. The conversations and screen sharing begins.
While he is talking, his brother knocks the door loudly and asks him to open it. Vibhor reluctantly stops speaking on the call, says he will “be right back”, turns off his mic and goes and opens the door. He scolds his brother for not taking his things in advance, and his brother expresses his displeasure in similar tones. An annoyed Vibhor then returns to his call with the door not locked and asks his brother to close the door while leaving properly. He asks his team to remind him of what they were talking about, but everyone seems to have forgotten. This annoys Vibhor further, but he recalls the conversation thread, and they start working together on Miro, a remote collaboration tool. Vibhor keeps his mic on so that he can respond and interject without switching tabs and breaking his flow.
However, his mother gets into an argument with the domestic help, which is clearly audible to him and his friends on the call. They go silent for a moment, and he switches tabs, mutes his mic and slams his door shut. Following this, Vibhor switches between the work tab and the call tab frequently- muting himself whenever he is not talking.
So this was a snapshot of Vibhor’s day. Let’s also meet Ria.
Meet Ria
Ria is a senior year undergraduate student at the same technical institute. Her friend circle has 5–6 guys and 2–3 girls, and they are planning a video call because they haven’t seen each other in a week The end semester exams are a day away, and yet most of the friends agree to come on the call and vent out their frustrations. They plan to hold this call after midnight so that no one is working actively on any work deadline.
Ria sent the meeting link at 12:05 on the friends’ WhatsApp group, and only a few joined. They all have their videos and mics off, till Aditya, one of the people on the call turns on his video. Slowly, videos start turning on, mics begin to turn on, and someone says “Sup guys”. Ria has a room of her own and does not use earphones. She does not have much noise in the environment at night, so she likes to keep her mic on most of the time. On the screen, Ria sees that Swati is on her phone, with a pillow under her head and dimmed lights. Swati brings her earphone’s mic close to her mouth, unmutes and whispers “Guys, my mom is sleeping in my room, so I will leave in a little while”. She mutes her mic and orients her phone sideways. Swati is not the only one on call lying on her bed. Some of the friends are sitting upright on their chairs and using laptops at their usual spots, and few are lying down and using phones with different angles of their faces visible in the call. Jayant joins the call with his video off, and occasionally joins the conversation through just his voice, and then mutes himself back.
With time, rants and laughter continue, Ria turns off her mic and video and goes to the kitchen to fetch a bottle of water and a glass. She comes back, pours herself a glass of water and then switches on her video only while she drinks. Riya does not want the sound of her pouring and drinking water to be heard, and while she is okay with drinking water on video, she turns it off whenever she leaves the chair. Aditya is talking about an amusing observation he has made, and they erupt into laughter. Aditya, however, stops laughing midway, immediately mutes his mic and looks away from the camera. A few moments later he looks at his screen again and whispers “I think I woke up my brother”, and keeps his voice lower in the remaining conversation.
Ria texts Swati, who has now left the call, and for some time multitasks- texting Swati through her phone, and at the same time, having the video call with the remaining friends. Aditya and Jayant often spoke up at the same time, and one muted himself and let the other continue talking. Midway, someone types a message on the group chat on Meet, and is met with typed reactions- “XDDD”, “LMAO” and “bruh”, and this short parallel conversation ends quickly.
While on call, Ria notices that many of her friends appear engrossed in other things- she notices that someone’s eyes are moving from side to side, as if they are reading, some have their heads down and are probably using their phone, and on some occasions, hears the sounds of people typing. She doesn’t mind this, though; she exhibits the same behaviour. Had this call been around work, then she says she may have reacted differently. At around 1:30, people start dropping out, and they wave their hands to say their goodbyes and leave the call. Swati switches tabs to continue working on an assignment.
What do I interpret?
Across all these interactions, the video call brings together the individual video streams of the participants. The physically situated ideas of proximity and directionality no longer are valid. Everyone on call is allocated the same amount of physical space on the screen, and are arranged in tiles (subject to UI and software changes). There is no distance or directionality of seeing people. Everything is in front of you- all the faces and the spaces in the call.
There is a common audio channel afforded by the device for the listener where it becomes hard to distinguish the speaker when multiple people speak up. The channel for cross-talk or parallel conversations, or breaking up from large centrally directed group conversations to smaller group conversations does not exist. Unlike common and public physical spaces, people cannot join this virtual space without a prior, explicit invite, limiting the virtual space to only the invited participants. These calls were many times planned, whereas much of in-college conversations were unplanned. And all of these virtual spaces exist on an artefact- a laptop or a smartphone.
Some use headphones/earphones to keep their conversations private from the family, to not get distracted by the sounds at their spaces and if they have poor quality speakers. Some do not use these aids, having physical spaces without much noise or due to discomfort associated with headphones/earphones.
These video streams consist of not only the participants’ faces and upper body, but also their rooms, their seating places, the objects in their backgrounds, their lighting conditions, their camera angles, the sounds from their homes and their voices.
These video calls bring together the physical spaces of the participants that are private to them. A video stream means giving up some of that privacy in exchange for communication and sharing these aspects with the others in the virtual call. Since these individual spaces are not co-located, they carry elements of the spaces into the virtual space, creating a conflict.
The participants on call control the conflicts from their end through restricting and enabling their cameras and microphones. These controls are new interactions in their communication with a shift to virtual spaces, which have taken them some time and “mistakes” to learn, and have resulted in new behaviours that they have adopted.
Physical Setups and Backgrounds
Most of the participants, like Vibhor, had fixed desks which they used for work, video calls and sometimes meals. Some moved around with their laptops- in the absence of fixed spaces, or when their rooms are getting cleaned. Many use mobile phones on their beds for more casual interactions. The sights of background visible to the other participants are thus varied- beds, rooms, almirahs, and the most common ones being walls. These sights were more visible with laptop webcams; on the mobile front cameras, most screen real estate is occupied by the face. Many have no choice or interest in dictating how their background should look like, limited by the private spaces available to them at their homes. However, there is an attempt to control it on occasions.
Raghav, a student who has a room for himself at his home, says that his bed is directly visible in his calls from his table, and is often unkempt, with clothes and blankets lying around untidily. He usually shifts the mess outside the view of his webcam before the call. When he feels lazier, he pushes his laptop screen back so that the bed goes out of sight and the roof comes in the picture. Raghav does not want to appear untidy and wants his video to look presentable. For Vibhor, the light's reflection is not something he can control, and thus, while he does not like it, he has made peace with it. However, he does ensure that the cupboards are not open as they are visible in the call. He also echoes the sentiment of appearing presentable; he cannot change his physical background, but he combs his hair before a video call in the same spirit. Vibhor’s friends on call too do not turn on their videos because they do not feel “ready”, having messy hair and sleepy faces. One participant reported putting effort into setting up his workspace, so his background looks presentable. Another confessed to shifting to different areas of the house to convey a different aesthetic impression- to a setting with books at the back during formal calls, and to his bed during informal calls.
Sounds and Noise
The conflict in the virtual space is manifested the most through conflicts of sounds of each of the physical spaces. Keeping the mic open offers its benefits of speaking without any explicit action of turning the mic on (akin to that at co-located spaces). Ria likes to keep her mic on, and so does Vibhor, as switching tabs while working just to turn on a mic and speak makes him lose track of his thoughts. In any collaborative setting, such an interaction would be desirable.
However, the mic does not carry only their voices, but also the background sounds- ambient or otherwise, that exist in their environment. While Riya is fortunate to have a silent space at nights, for Vibhor, the sounds of his arguing mother reaching his friends cause him embarrassment and annoyance. These feelings manifest in the actions of turning off his mic, slamming the door, and then adopting the behaviour of turning off the mic whenever not talking.
For Vibhor, noises at his end should not be a part of the call; they are private to his home. Ria keeps only her mic off while drinking water, like many others. For her, this is a gesture of respect. She treats the call as a separate virtual space that should not be disturbed with unnecessary sounds from her end- sounds irrelevant to the call. Aditya, Vibhor and the numerous participants also echo the same sentiments. To harmonise the coexistence of their physical spaces and to respect the virtual space, they all take measures to control the possible distractions from their end, by turning audios and videos on and off.
These measures, while for casual conversations are relatively relaxed, can be stressful for the less casual conversations, as demonstrated in Vibhor’s case, who feels annoyed by his brother knocking the door while he was talking. He tries on his end to reduce noise by asking his family to move away from his room; however, it is something that he cannot avoid entirely. The resulting anxiety is often vented out through shouting and annoyed demands for the family to stay quiet.
Movement
As receivers witnessing these spaces, participants said that they noticed, but did not mind for how the other backgrounds looked, as long as the backgrounds appeared static and were well lit, subject to the occasion. The noise was definitely a source of conflict, and they acknowledged having asked other participants mute themselves owing to disturbance from their ambient background noises. While the physical appearance of the space was not a source of conflict, the movement in the space was one, for both the video streamer and the receiver. Having large movements- of the self and the family in the video was a distracting experience, one that would have been normal in the physical interactions. There is an unsaid expectation to keep the background static and unmoving. In the case of Vibhor, this manifests as stress when his brother walks around the part of the room that is visible through Vibhor’s webcam. Vibhor now locks the door when in an important call to keep his background static, and shouts at his family to keep out.
Even in calls with friends, the participants try to keep their families and their own movements out of their streamed physical spaces. While Vibhor’s friends know that he shares a room with his sibling, Vibhor actively tries to minimise his presence on call. When mothers walk into their calls from the back, participants immediately turn off their camera and mic turn them back on only after she leaves.
In the case of Aditya, when his brother woke up, he was not visible in his background, and thus Aditya turned off only his mic. However, many others turn off their video regardless. However, if someone’s dog walks up, this is not the case. These behaviours arise from a constructed need to control the privacy and a constructed need to respect the shared virtual space. Ria, when she leaves the meeting to get herself some water, also turns off her video. While her empty chair could convey the impression she is gone from the call, she does not employ it; she just turns off her audio and video to signal she is not there. At the same time, Jayant also exhibits this state- audio and video turned off; however, he is present and involved in the conversation.
Thus, for both the sender and the receiver(s), these new behaviours of turning videos and audios off- to hide family, to hide sounds and movement of self, suddenly break the flow of the conversation and the interaction, introduce new stresses and add a layer of ambiguity to the call. For Vibhor, the constant control of the sounds and sights gets tiring, and he feels exhausted after most video calls in the mornings.
Participants tried to minimise the noise, distractions, presence of the family and movement in the shared virtual space. However, we see the opposite too, where participants try to minimise the volume of the video call and their own voice in their physical space. Aditya enjoys the call and is laughing with his friends, but he has to control his own loudness after his brother wakes up. Swati too only whispers in the call as her mother is sleeping. Ria has adopted to keep her loudspeakers at a particular volume so that the sounds do not disturb her parents. The family also starts to adopt new behaviours- siblings give a silent visual, physical signal before walking by, and parents accommodate the locking of doors, slamming doors, and being shouted at.
Some New Behaviours in the Shift to Virtual
I now summarize the insights I have come to interpret from this work. I state these in light of my work, and these may not be generalised to all demographics. If you feel you have observed similar behaviours, do share it!
- The physical spaces of each participant are unique and carry unique imagery, sounds and movements. These spaces for the student population studied are co-inhabited by their families.
- The video calls further the emphasis on presentation of self.
- The shared virtual space of a video call is viewed as a separate space, with its own set of physical properties that the participants in call try to harmonize.
- To harmonize the virtual space, the participants each exert control over their own physical space. This control, while, is facilitated by the tools on the applications, is often does physically. Be it through warding off co-inhabitants, scheduling calls at specific times of the day; this need to constantly control can become very stressful for the participant.
- This need to control has led to new behaviours in social interactions, many of which would not have mattered in an in-person offline space. These behaviours are not only limited to the participants but also their co-inhabitants and their lifestyles.
And with this, I wrap up this set of ethnographic description. I acknowledge that this must have been a long read, so thank you for sticking for so long! All illustrations are from unDraw, a great open-source illustration initiative!
In the next part (yes), I’ll present *some* larger implications of this shift from physical to virtual spaces of video calls. That will definitely be an interesting read, so I hope 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, writing stories because it makes research so much more accessible. Stories are fun, but also hard to craft, especially while making composite narratives. Tell me your stories about this shift on LinkedIn!
