Cover not available
Article published In:
Skype and domestic settings: Interpersonal video communication as a site of human sociality
Edited by Richard Harper, Rod Watson and Christian Licoppe
[Pragmatics 27:3] 2017
► pp. 319–350

The ‘interrogative gaze’

Making video calling and messaging ‘accountable’

| Social Shaping Research, Cambridge
| Microsoft Research, Cambridge
| Telecom ParisTech, Nice-Sophia-Antipolis
| University of Bristol, Cambridge
This paper identifies salient properties of how talk about video communication is organised interactionally, and how this interaction invokes an implied order of behaviour that is treated as ‘typical’ and ‘accountably representative’ of video communication. This invoked order will be called an interrogative gaze. This is an implied orientation to action, one that is used as a jointly managed interpretative schema that allows video communication to be talked about and understood as rationally, purposively and collaboratively undertaken in particular, ‘known in common’ ways. This applies irrespective of whether the actions in question are prospective (are about to happen) or have been undertaken in the past and are being accounted for in the present or are ‘generally the case’ – in current talk. The paper shows how this constitutive device also aids in sense making through such things as topic management in video-mediated interaction, and in elaborating the salience of the relationship between this and the patterned governance of social affairs – viz, mother-daughter, friend-friend – as normatively achieved outcomes. It will be shown how the interrogative gaze is variously appropriate and consequentially invoked not just in terms of what is done in a video call or making such calls accountable, but in helping articulate different orders of connection between persons, and how these orders have implications for sensible and appropriate behaviour in video calling and hence, for the type of persons who are involved. This, in turn, explains how a decision to avoid using video communication is made an accountably reasonable thing to do. The relevance of these findings for the sociology of everyday life and the philosophy of action are explored.
Keywords: video calling, video mediated communication, Skype, conversation analysis, ethnomethodology, sociology, philosophy of action, family, friendship, participation frameworks, reasoning
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Approach to evidence
  • 3.Evidence in everyday reasoning about Skype
  • 4.Why Skype?
    • 4.1Particular reasons
    • 4.2Reasons to interrogate
    • 4.3Reasons as a particular kind of feature of social interaction
    • 4.4Reasons not to Skype
    • 4.5Reasons as a vocabulary for accountability
    • 4.6Reasons beyond sight
    • 4.7Reasons as located acts
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 16 October 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.27.3.02har
References (38)
References
Adato, A. 1980. “Occasionality as a Constituent Feature of the Known-in-common Character of Topics.” Human Studies 31: 47–64. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Aronsson, K., and A. Cekaite. 2011. “Activity Contracts and Directives in Everyday Family Politics.” Discourse and Society 22 (2): 137–54. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Davidson, D. 1963. “Action, Reasons, and Causes.” Journal of Philosophy 601: 685–700, repr. in Action & Events, 19801: 3–20. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Duranti, A., and C. Goodwin, 1992. “Editors’ Introduction.” Rethinking Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Elias, N. 1969 (or 1939). The Civilizing Process. Vol. I. The History of Manners. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Fitzgerald, R., and W. Housley. 2015. Advances in Membership Categorisation Analysis. London: Sage. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Garfinkel, H. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.Google Scholar
Garfinkel, H., M. Lynch, and E. Livingston. 1981. “The Work of a Discovering Science Construed with Materials from the Optically-Delivered Pulsar.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences. 111: 131–58. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Garfinkel, H., and H. Sacks. 1970. “On Formal Structures of Practical Actions.” In Theoretical Sociology: Perspectives and Developments, ed. by J. C. McKinney, and E. A. Tiryakian, 337–366. New York: Appleton-Century Crofts.Google Scholar
Goldman, A. 2006. Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology and Neuroscience of Mind Reading. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goodwin, C. 1981. Conversational Organization, Interaction Between Speakers and Hearers. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Hanson, N. R. 1972. Observation and Explanation: A Guide to Philosophy of Science. London: George Allen and Unwin.Google Scholar
Harper, R. 2010. Texture: Human Expression in the Age of Communications Overload. Cambridge, MA: MIT. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Harper, R., D. Randall, and W. Sharrock. 2016. Choice. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Harper, R., D. R. Watson, and J. Woelfer. This issue. “The Skype Paradox: Homelessness and Selective Intimacy in the Use of Communications Technology.” In Special Issue of Pragmatics, Interpersonal video communication as a site of human sociality, ed. by Harper et al. Pragmatics 27 (3):. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logo
Ingold, T. 2011. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Abingdon: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hume, D. [1739–40] 1974. A Treatise on Human Nature, 2nd Edition, ed. P. Niddich. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Laugier, S. 2000. Why We Need Ordinary Language Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Leist, A. (ed.) 2007. Action in Context. Berlin: de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lynch, M. 1993. Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action: Ethnomethodology and Social Studies of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Madianou, M., and D. Miller. 2012. Migration and New Media: Transnational Families and Polymedia. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Maynard, D. W. 1988. “Language, Interaction, and Social Problems.” Social Problems 351: 311–334. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Miller, D., and J. Sininan. 2014. Webcam. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Papacharissi, Z. (ed.). 2011. A Networked Self. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Rintel, S., R. Harper, and K. O’Hara. 2016. “The Tyranny of the Everyday in Mobile Video Messaging.” Proceedings of CH’16. San Jose: ACM Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sacks, H. 1972. “An Initial Investigation of the Usability of Conversational Data for Doing Sociology.” In Studies in Social Interaction, ed. by D. Sudnow, 31–74. New York: The Free Press.Google Scholar
1974. “On the Analysability of Stories by Children.” In Ethnomethodology: Selected Readings, ed. by R. Turner, 216–232. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Google Scholar
1992. Lectures on Conversation, Volumes I & II1. Malden: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Sacks, H., and E. Schegloff. 1979. “Two Preferences in the Organization of Reference to Persons in Conversation and Their Interaction.” In Everyday Language: Studies in Ethnomethodology, ed. by G. Psathas, 15–21. New York: Irvington Press.Google Scholar
Sandis, C. 2012. The Things We Do and Why We Do Them. Basingstoke: Palgrave. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Searle, J. R. 1963. “Proper Names.” In Philosophy and Ordinary Language, ed. by C. E. Caton, 154–161. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Sharrock, W. W., and D. R. Watson. 1984. “What’s the Point of “Rescuing Motives”?” British Journal of Sociology, 35 (3): 435–51. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Velleman, J. D. 2013. Foundations for Moral Relativism. Cambridge: Open Book. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Watson, D. R. 1981. “Conversational and Organisational Uses of Proper Names: An Aspect of Counsellor-Client Interaction.” In Medical Work: Realities and Routines, ed. by P. Atkinson, and C. Heath, 91–108. Farnborough: Gower.Google Scholar
2005. “The Visibility Arrangements of Public Space: Conceptual Resources and Methodological Issues in Analysing Pedestrian Movements.” In Communication and Cognition, Special Issue, ed. by M. Ball, 38 (3/4): 201–229.Google Scholar
2014. “Trust in Interpersonal Interaction and Cloud Computing.” In Trust, Computing and Society, ed. by R. H. R. Harper, 172–198. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wittgenstein, L. 1953. Philosophical Investigations, 4th Ed. trans G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and J. Schulte, Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
1964. The Blue and Brown Books. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Cited by (5)

Cited by five other publications

Bleakley, Anna, Daniel Rough, Justin Edwards, Philip Doyle, Odile Dumbleton, Leigh Clark, Sean Rintel, Vincent Wade & Benjamin R. Cowan
2022. Bridging social distance during social distancing: exploring social talk and remote collegiality in video conferencing. Human–Computer Interaction 37:5 ► pp. 404 ff. DOI logo
Han, Dongqi, Yasamin Heshmat, Denise Y. Geiskkovitch, Zixuan Tan & Carman Neustaedter
2022. A Scenario-Based Study of Doctors and Patients on Video Conferencing Appointments from Home. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 29:5 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Phillips, Jake, Chalen Westaby, Sam Ainslie & Andrew Fowler
2021. ‘I don't like this job in my front room’: Practising probation in the COVID-19 pandemic. Probation Journal 68:4 ► pp. 426 ff. DOI logo
Knowles, Bran & Vicki L. Hanson
2018. Older Adults’ Deployment of ‘Distrust’. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 25:4 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Yang, Lillian & Carman Neustaedter
2018. Our House. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 2:CSCW ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 15 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.