Conversation analysis of recorded home video calls by six couples in distance relationships in the North-eastern USA. The chapter examines how these couples handled distortions, meaning garbled sound or frozen, blurry picture.
Six couplesCouples in distance relationships, given webcams and video calling software to use from home.
Every call recordedAn automated remote system recorded every call, five to 11 per couple, over about two months.
145 casesAn earlier report collected 145 cases of coping with distortion. This chapter analyses cases from five of the couples.
Close analysisTurn by turn study of how couples drew on the relationship and the technology to explain each moment.
BWhat the study found
Garbled soundrepairing talk and ruling out misunderstanding
•In these calls, listeners often flagged dropouts and speakers simply repeated themselves.As in face-to-face talk, these repairs needed no mention of the technology.
•Partners who asked whether the call had cut out ruled out a misunderstanding.A request to repeat could also signal confusion or disapproval. Blaming the technology matters most on topics that are sensitive for the relationship.
•The chapter argues a frozen partner looks almost the same as an unresponsive one.Treating the technology as the cause gives couples flexibility in handling such silences.
Frozen or blurry picturelet pass or turned into play
•In these calls, couples reported picture problems and moved on.Unlike garbled sound, picture problems never had to be told apart from a possible relationship problem.
•Couples played down poor pictures by reasoning about the relationship.For example, pixelation did not matter as long as one could see the partner's face.
•In these calls, distortions sparked affectionate teasing, and none of the recorded teases misfired.Teases about frozen faces, delays or a kiss the partner could not see turned a complaint into a way of recognising the couple.
The argumentomnirelevance, a context always available to explain a moment
•The chapter argues the relationship and the technology work as paired explanations.If one is at issue, the other is not, yet both must be relevant for either to come to the fore.
CKey takeaway
Omnirelevance can be a central feature of technologised interaction. Video calling couples can treat the relationship or the technology as the context that explains a glitch, blaming technology to head off misreadings or turning frozen video into play.
Made for this site with AI assistance from the verified research brief. It is not the paper's own figure.
Abstract
Omnirelevance in Membership Categorisation Analysis refers to participants invoking categories that treat particular interactional moments as controlled by the context of the current activity. This chapter argues that omnirelevance is a central feature of technologised interaction, and explores it through how couples in long-distance relationships cope with audio and video distortions when video calling. Drawing on naturalistic recordings of six couples over two months (145 cases of coping with distortion), I show that couples treat both the relationship and the technology as omnirelevant devices, deployed in a fluid interdependence. With audio distortions, relational and technological omnirelevance is used to disambiguate the source of trouble in repairs. With video distortions, it becomes a resource for expressive performance, including relational teasing that turns distortion into a display of doing being a couple. Distortions are thus not simply noise to be remedied but organisational resources for achieving conversational continuity. The chapter proposes that omnirelevance and affordances, taken together, offer a productive approach to the interdependence of technology and social interaction.
Research brief
By Sean Rintel.
Takeaway: Omnirelevance (a context always available to settle what a moment means) helps video-calling couples handle glitches. Blaming the technology heads off a relational misreading of garbled audio, and invoking the relationship turns frozen video into teasing, because glitches draw attention to who they are together.
Why this matters
What was known
Research on video calling and other communication technology has focused on designed features. Distortions have been left to engineering quality-of-service or usability threshold research. However, there is far less research about how users actually manage such distortions as part of the interaction.(§Video Calling in Relational Contexts, p. 7)
What this paper adds
Rather than asking when distortions become unacceptable, the chapter analyses, turn by turn, what couples themselves do with distortions in recorded calls. It brings a concept from membership categorisation analysis to the question of how technology shapes interaction. Omnirelevance, I argue, is a central feature of technologised interaction.(§Introduction, p. 1)
Who it matters to
Researchers in membership categorisation analysis, conversation analysis and computer-mediated communication, and those interested in how technology and society shape each other. provides a fruitful approach to exploring the practices through which interaction is technologised and thus the wider sociological interest in the interdependence of technology and society(§Conclusions, p. 27)
Research question
How do couples in long-distance relationships cope with audio and video distortions in video calling, and how do they draw on the relationship and the technology as omnirelevant devices in doing so?
Method and data
Design
Conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis of naturally occurring, recorded video calls.
Setting
Couples in distance relationships recruited in the North-eastern USA, given webcams and the Wave Three Inc. Session video calling software, and asked to video call from home. An automated remote recording system captured all calls.
Participants / data
Six couples, each with between five and 11 calls. One hundred and forty-five cases of coping with distortions were collected (57 technology-oriented remedies, 42 content-oriented remedies and 46 non-remedial accounts, as reported in Rintel 2010). The chapter draws on content-oriented remedies and non-remedial accounts from five of the couples.
Duration
A goal of at least 20 minutes of video calling per week over a two-month period, not strictly enforced.
Analysis
Sequential and categorical analysis of extracts in which participants treated audio or video distortions as conversationally relevant.
Findings
Many dropouts were fixed as in face-to-face talk. When audio dropped out, the hearer often simply flagged the problem and the speaker repeated themselves, as in face-to-face conversation, with no mention of the technology. #
“In both of these cases the only device required for organisational recognisability is the ordinary orientation to conversational repair as part of the turn-taking system itself”
Blaming the technology rules out a misunderstanding. When a request to repeat could also have signalled confusion or disapproval, partners asked about the technology ("did it cut out?"), ruling out a problem of meaning or morality. This matters most on relationally sensitive topics. The relationship and the technology work as paired explanations: #
“These two omnirelevant positions are thus organisational counterpoints - if one is at issue the other is not - but also counterparts - they must both be relevant for one to be foregrounded while the other is backgrounded.”
A silent partner, or a silent connection? A partner who seems not to respond might be ignoring you or might have frozen. Citing an earlier analysis, the chapter argues that treating the technology as the cause gives couples flexibility in handling such silences, because #
“technological unresponsiveness is uncomfortably close - perhaps having almost the same apparent form - to interpersonal unresponsiveness”
Picture problems were let pass. Problems with the picture were handled differently from audio ones. Couples reported them and moved on, or treated them as part of how they are together in this medium. #
“None of the video or audio/video cases involved disambiguation of technological distortion versus a potential relational problem (or, more broadly, any problem of understanding).”
Seeing your face is what counts. Couples played down poor picture quality with relational reasoning, for example that pixelation does not matter as long as one can see the partner's face. #
“the technological constraints are to be judged against their relational enablements”
Glitches became teasing material. Distortions sparked affectionate teasing, about frozen faces, delays or a kiss the other could not see, and none of the recorded teases misfired. #
“The fact of the distortion has been actively converted from a complaint resource into a relational resource for recognising that they are a couple maintaining their relationship via video calling.”
Questions this paper answers
What does 'omnirelevance' mean?
A concept from membership categorisation analysis, after Harvey Sacks. Some categories (such as being a couple or being on a video call) are so fundamental to an activity that people can always invoke them. They use them to control how a moment is understood, especially when something goes wrong. (See Responses to Distorted Audio, p. 15; §Teases, p. 20.)
Why do people on video calls blame the connection when they need something repeated?
Because a request to repeat is ambiguous. It may mean the speaker was not heard, or that what they said was puzzling or objectionable. Naming the technology as the culprit rules out the relational reading, which is especially useful when the topic is delicate. (See Responses to Distorted Audio, p. 15; Responses to Distorted Audio, p. 16.)
Are audio and video glitches equally disruptive?
No. In recorded video calls between long-distance couples, audio was treated as the main channel, so audio trouble needed repair and sometimes an explanation. Video was treated as secondary, or as a stage for performance, so even long freezes were usually let pass or played with. (See Responses to Distorted Audio, p. 12; §Responses to Distorted Video, p. 16; §Teases, p. 20.)
Can video call glitches actually help a relationship?
In a sense. A distortion can become a shared joke about being a couple who must date by video, converting a complaint into a way of affirming the relationship. Teasing suits this because it plays with trouble while signalling intimacy. (See Responses to Distorted Video, p. 19; §Teases, p. 20.)
Contributions and implications
Operational problems such as distortions should be studied as participants' concerns, not dismissed as noise or threshold issues. I am arguing against treating operational problems as mere noise or threshold issues(§Video Calling in Relational Contexts, p. 7)
Distortions are central to how couples maintain long-distance relationships by video, not side issues. Distortions of audio and video are anything but epiphenomenal sources of repairable noise in the business of couples maintaining long-distance relationships.(§Conclusions, p. 26)
Combining omnirelevance with the affordances approach offers a method for studying how interaction is technologised.
Limitations
The three-way recording set-up could not measure asymmetries in transmission and reception such as latency. it did not allow for direct or measurable analysis of asymmetrical transmission/reception such as audio/visual latency or clarity(§Methods and Data, p. 9)
Recordings did not capture participants' whole screens or their talk in other media (such as phone or text chat), so the data do not represent all of their online relational maintenance.
A small data set, analysed in the rich descriptive tradition of conversation analysis rather than as a large corpus.
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Concepts
Omnirelevance
A concept from membership categorisation analysis: participants invoking categories that reflexively treat the understanding of particular interactional moments as controlled by the context of the current activity(§Introduction, p. 1)
Technologised interaction
Following Hutchby: The affordances of technology are materially inescapable but their relevance as a semiotic resource is a matter for participants.(§Introduction, p. 1)
Affordances: enablements and constraints
Gibson's actionable properties of objects, extended by Norman to social affordances. Distortions are treated here as material constraints. Affordances that enable action are 'enablements', while affordances that limit action are 'constraints'.(§Technologised Interaction, p. 5)
Teasing
A practice couples use to enact intimacy and, following Drew, a categorisation procedure that turns something normal into something deviant. Campos and colleagues, citing Keltner and colleagues, define it as: playful provocation that comments on something of relevance to the target(§Couples' Talk and Teasing, p. 8)
How to cite
Sean Rintel. 2015. Omnirelevance in Technologised Interaction: Couples Coping with Video Calling Distortions. R. Fitzgerald & W. Housley (Eds.) Membership categorization analysis: Studies of social knowledge in action, 123-150. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781473917873.n6
This brief was prepared with AI assistance and published by Sean Rintel. It is not the authors' published text. Page numbers refer to this PDF.
BibTeX
@inbook{rintel2015omnirelevance,
author = {Rintel, Sean},
title = {Omnirelevance in Technologised Interaction: Couples Coping with Video Calling Distortions},
booktitle = {R. Fitzgerald & W. Housley (Eds.) Membership categorization analysis: Studies of social knowledge in action},
year = {2015},
month = {March},
publisher = {Sage},
url = {https://doi.org/10.4135/9781473917873.n6},
pages = {123-150},
isbn = {978-1-446-27073-8},
note = {Rintel, S. (2015). Omnirelevance in technologized interaction: Couples coping with video calling distortions. Pp. 123-150 in R. Fitzgerald & W. Housley (Eds.) Membership categorization analysis: Studies of social knowledge in action. London: Sage.},
doi = {10.4135/9781473917873.n6},
}