Ethnography of Video Calls, Through Video Calls (5/5)
Because Ethnography is a learning process, one where I learn about people, and my own self.
This remote digital ethnography on video call enabled virtual spaces only presents me a tiny snippet of the everyday lives and frames that the participants choose to show the fellow companions on call and me.
In this last part, I reflect on my work, process and learning in this ethnographic study. I also tie my work to the larger schools of thoughts in Anthropology and talk about the promise technology holds to solve the problems I have gathered.
No recaps for this one; let's keep it a short read. Linking the previous parts of this work below:
- Part 1: My Motivation and Objective
- Part 2: My Positionality, Research Method and Peculiarity of the Field
- Part 3: Some Ethnographic Stories and Themes
- Part 4: Larger Implications of the Shift to Virtual
Reflecting on my work
I have not lived among the participants after the closure of colleges, and the insight that I gather is limited to my interpretation of what is presented. I am not fully immersed in their lives, and I may not know the conditions under which they have adopted new behaviours in the virtual space. Some factors affect them at home, and there are moods when they feel more interactive- these, I do not explore in this study. I have not probed the students' everyday acts and practices; rather, I focus on only their online interactions with their peers in line of my objective to study the coexistence of private physical spaces in a shared virtual space enabled through video calls.
In my work, I speak in my own voice, as the narrator of these narratives and the insights that follow. I piece together the interviews and observations from passive and participatory activities. I use my own experiences and the experiences that I have read over text messages from these participants over months, to stitch these narratives, and I try to attune them to the time before the shift from physical to virtual spaces through comparisons and descriptions.
Being a participant in this shift to shared virtual spaces, I myself experience much of what I have described above. Thus, this activity comes off as a learning experience; the students are not alone in the new stresses they are facing.
While my friend circle is active in discussing the problems that we face, the discussion remains largely on the surface owing to the short textual conversations and the occasional bursts of humour and nostalgia that steers the conversation away from these topics. In fact, from these participants who are in my circles, I have learnt about the stresses they are under, and some of it does come off as shocking and unheard of to me. The close attention I paid to them at the hostel is now paid to my family. Instead of sanitising this, or expressing sympathy, I am taking this up with them. I hope to remain involved and stir this conversation with more friends and at greater depths.
These new behaviours and controls are not timeless; they have evolved from the beginning of the pandemic, and I expect, will continue to evolve ahead. Students have started to be more careful to not accidentally turn on their mics and videos in large classes, learning from previous embarrassments of themselves and their peers in the shared space.
I argue that there cannot be any claim of representing the reality authoritatively in this domain. While in in-person interactions, the presentation of self is the layer that one can study, in the online interactions, these layers stack rapidly.
What a person looks at, I argue, is a very layered video stream. What is visible in the shared virtual space is a layer of presentation of self, followed by a layer of the digital artifact- the affordances, augmentations and interruptions that it presents, followed by a layer of the setting up of that artifact to present oneself. As an ethnographer, I add a layer of my own interpretations; thus the view that is presented here has passed many layers of filters, all of which affect the digital representation and behaviour of the person in the call.
While this form of video call interaction, looked this way, may seem unnatural, or different, it is nevertheless a real interaction, one that has to be adopted, that has been adopted and will continue evolving in the future, especially as we move ahead in the pandemic.
Reflecting on the “knowledge” constructed
I feel it is essential to reflect on the demographic that I have studied. The educational institutions do not solely comprise this rather privileged demographic. Rather, there are different degrees of privilege that one has, and they may reflect in the virtual coexistence of physical spaces. These privileges are exposed in video calls- not just explicitly in terms of having an aesthetically pleasing background, a room for self and the absence of noise, but also implicitly through their artefacts on which the virtual spaces exist. The consequences of having devices that may not support video calls, or having limited internet connectivity- locally and geographically are significant and worth exploring, and I acknowledge that.
In fact, the materiality of video calls can be seen as a case of the digital divide and privilege, a materiality heavily shaped by their cultural capital. And these findings may not even be true for different populaces, communities or age groups.
This work is thus limited in its exploration around similar people of a similar socio-cultural background based in Delhi, a small physical location.
The knowledge that I have arrived at is an interpretation of my observations. My observations arise through the lenses that I carry- lenses of my personal habitus, lived experiences, and thematic exploration. Thus, all observations that I make and conclusions that I draw are not truths; rather, they are the way I construct reality through what I have gathered. My role as a participant in the interactions is also shaped by my research aims and habitus, and so is the inquiry done through interviews.
There may be certain views, silences and behaviours that I would not notice, and someone with a different habitus would. As a result, this work captures my voice as an ethnographer- my perceptions and understandings.
The interpretations I make are thus open to challenge and discourse; they reflect my understanding of a very small population of the students. With more time and a longer engagement, I hope to make this writing polyvocal and dialogical and engage in more stakeholders- parents, teachers, siblings, and domestic helpers with the study.
Impact
For practitioners of material culture, the role of the digital artefacts in shaping the virtual spaces may be an interesting exploration. Further, this account can help understand the new social spaces and the resulting affordances and challenges. Virtual spaces in the pandemic are making it possible to human, and never before have these spaces been such a large part of our lives. The virtuality of social is now much greater, with entire physical, social spaces being replaced by virtual shared spaces.
I envision this work provoking more user research- around the ideas of presentation of self, power, attention, inequality, materiality, privacy and disclosure in digital communication technologies. The lines between what is real and what is virtual are blurring, and the prevalence of video calls in everyday lives is a testament to this. This work can spark a discourse, and while is limited to students, it can bring in multiple stakeholders and their voices, leading to the design and development of technologies that can help tackle it.
The promise of technology
Technological advancements- through research-informed design and innovation so seem to be helping out with these challenges already. With virtual backgrounds, facial augmentations and foreground augmentations coming into the forefront, these physical spaces will become mixed reality spaces- with some elements of sight physical and some virtual. I have not explored the adoption or impact of mixed reality in this study.
While I know that the data I have collected is insufficient to arrive at any conclusions, if the scope of this study were larger, I would be constructing an interpretive ethnographic account, that would be an end itself, and at the same time, allow the speculation of the larger patterns of how new behaviours and interactions are arising owing to the coexistence of private physical spaces in shared virtual spaces.
With the entire world consumed by the pandemic, social interactions are being remade through technology, and new stresses and conflicts are being introduced. While the world has been quick to construct shared norms and adapt, a detailed ethnographic narrative would enable technologists and designers to develop solutions that have not yet been imagined. This is beginning to happen, with the introduction of proximity video calls in virtual conferences held on gather.town and breakout rooms on Zoom.
Hopefully, this ethnographic journey has helped you think and speculate about what things you can do as well. I invite any suggestions, feedback and discussions!
With this, I mark the end of my project work. What did I do? Study the students in the pandemic induced shift. What did I create? An ethnographic description. Why does it matter? Because now that we know deeply about the challenges and behaviours, we can spark discourse, and speculate the designs of technologies to help everyone!
I hope you enjoyed this 5 part series! Stay Safe, Stay Happy!
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, who treats research like education and keeps learning from it. Say hello to me on LinkedIn if you want to talk about it over virtual coffee!
