Connecting Distributed Families: Camera Work for Three-party Mobile Video Calls

Gan, Yumei; Greiffenhagen, Christian; Reeves, Stuart

Abstract

Mobile video calling technologies have become a critical link to connect distributed families. However, these technologies have been principally designed for video calling between two parties, whereas family video calls involve young children often comprise three parties, namely a co-present adult (a parent or grandparent) helping with the interaction between the child and another remote adult. We examine how manipulation of phone cameras and management of co-present children is used to stage parent-child interactions. We present results from a video-ethnographic study based on 40 video recordings of video calls between 'left-behind' children and their migrant parents in China. Our analysis reveals a key practice of 'facilitation work', performed by grandparents, as a crucial feature of three-party calls. Facilitation work offers a new concept for HCI's broader conceptualisation of mobile video calling, suggesting revisions that design might take into consideration for triadic interactions in general.

Citation

Gan, Y., Greiffenhagen, C., & Reeves, S. (2020). Connecting Distributed Families: Camera Work for Three-party Mobile Video Calls. In CHI '20: Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (1-12). https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376704

• Conference Name: CHI '20: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
• Conference Location: Honolulu HI USA
• Start Date: Apr 25, 2020
• End Date: Apr 30, 2020
• Acceptance Date: Dec 6, 2019
• Online Publication Date: Apr 23, 2020
• Publication Date: Apr 21, 2020
• Deposit Date: May 20, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: May 27, 2020
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Volume: 2020-Apr
• Pages: 1-12
• Book Title: CHI '20: Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
• ISBN: 9781450367080
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376704
• Keywords: camera work, conversation analysis, distributed families, mobile video calls, facilitation work
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/4475733
• Publisher URL: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3313831.3376704
• Related Public URLs: https://chi2020.acm.org/