The Unseen Voices of Our Video Calls — Epoche B2
The shape of a Saturday call Every Saturday at eight in the evening there is a video call home, and the phone at the other end is propped against the sugar tin on the kitchen counter. That single fact of placement determines everything that follows. A phone held in the hand frames a face; a phone leaning on a tin at counter height frames a kitchen, so the picture contains an aunt, half of the pressure cooker, and whoever happens to cross behind her. What forty minutes of it produced last week, in order: a mother's hand entering the frame to correct the angle; a grandmother, never visible, calling from the direction of the stove that the fish curry needs more tamarind than the aunt is prepared to admit; and a cousin shouting through a doorway, also never visible, that the building's cricket team lost Sunday's match by nine runs and that the umpire was entirely to blame. Nobody apologised for any of it. Nobody said 'sorry, one second'. The natural description — a conversation between two people that other people keep interrupting — is wrong, and the argument of this essay is that it is wrong in an instructive way. What is actually happening is that a room is in session, and the caller has been placed inside it; the aunt is not the other party to a conversation but the person holding the door open. Getting this right explains three things at once: why no one apologises, why six years abroad reversed a settled preference about video calls, and why the aunt's knee remains, for the third week running, unaccounted for. Why 'interruption' is the wrong word An interruption is a violation, and a violation requires a rule that has been broken. The rule being imported here is the one Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson set out in their account of how conversational turn-taking works: participants overwhelmingly take one turn at a time, with remarkably small gaps and remarkably little overlap, achieved by a system in which the current speaker may select the next, or, failing that, another may self-select at a point where the turn could grammatically end. Their model is a description of a conversation — a single encounter with a settled set of participants. A kitchen at eight in the evening is not one conversation. It is several partly overlapping ones sharing a space, and a voice from the stove is not competing for the floor of the call, because the call's floor is not the only floor in the room. Erving Goffman supplied the machinery for saying this precisely, in the essay in which he argued that the ordinary pair of terms, speaker and hearer, is far too crude. Any stretch of talk has what he called a participation framework: the people within earshot stand in different relations to it. Some are ratified participants, officially part of the encounter; among these, some are addressed — the talk is aimed at them — and others are ratified but unaddressed, entitled to be there and to listen without being spoken to. Others again are bystanders, who overhear without official standing. Goffman's term for a shift between these arrangements — a speaker turning to include someone else, a listener becoming an addressee — is a change of footing , and his central observation is that such shifts happen constantly and are managed by speakers as a matter of course. On this description the Saturday call is not anomalous at all. The caller is a ratified participant who is frequently unaddressed; the grandmother, invisible and audible, is a ratified participant of the kitchen who intermittently addresses the call; the cousin, shouting a cricket result through a doorway without appearing, changes the caller's footing from bystander to addressee for one sentence and then returns him. No apology is offered because nothing was breached. Apology would be appropriate if a two-person encounter had been intruded upon, and there is no two-person encounter to intrude upon. What the propped phone is doing The sugar tin is doing real work, and it is worth separating the choice from the accident. The camera position determines the participation framework the distant party can enter: a face-height handheld frame admits one person and excludes the room, while a counter-height propped frame admits the room and makes the aunt one of its occupants. Whether or not anyone in that kitchen thought about it in those terms, the effect is a design decision about who the caller gets to be. Daniel Miller and Jolynna Sinanan's ethnography of how people actually use webcams found this pattern to be widespread rather than eccentric: among long-distance couples and separated families, a great deal of the value came from connections left open while both parties did something else — cooking, working, sitting in the same virtual room in near-silence. Talk was not the point; being there was. Mirca Madianou gave the phenomenon a name in her work on migrant families, ambient co-presence : an awareness of the everyday goings-on of distant others, maintained continuously and peripherally rather than through concentrated conversation. That is exactly what a phone against a sugar tin delivers, and it is a different good from a conversation, not a degraded version of one. Why the undivided call is the tiring one Here is the turn in the argument. If the room call were simply a poor substitute for real attention, then the one-to-one video call — two faces, nothing in the background, no one shouting about tamarind — ought to be the restorative one. The reported experience is the reverse: it is the undivided call that leaves the caller lonelier, and the difference is mechanical rather than sentimental. Jeremy Bailenson set out an argument for why sustained video calls are exhausting, identifying four causes. First, close-up eye gaze in enormous quantity: on a one-to-one call the other person's face occupies much of the screen at an apparent distance that, in a room, would be reserved for intimacy or for confrontation, and unlike in a room there is n