"It's Kind of Boring Looking at Just the Face"

Abstract

Mobile videochat use has been growing, especially for teens. To better understand teens' videochat practices, we conducted a two-week photo diary study with 16 teens. We found that most often, teens videochat with their closest friends from their bedrooms when they feel lonely or bored. Teens turned to videochat when understimulated but also felt understimulated during videochat. In order to manage this, they multitasked -teens moved from active chatting to co-presence while engaged in separate activities like scrolling social feeds or playing games. We uncovered social norms of reciprocity of attention, where teens match the attention level of the other and give leeway to briefly divert attention. Digital notifications did not feel disruptive to the videochat but family members' interruptions felt disruptive as teens' domestic context intruded into their virtual peer setting. We discuss these findings and their implications for research and design of videochat systems.

Together in Bed?

“…in pubs [47], and further quantified by Mayer et al [40]. Similarly to findings in the context of videochat [59], lack of reciprocity of attention between our participants was highlighted as a potential source of conflicts. Others have identified the phenomenon where people desire technology non-use [4,53], wishing to dis-integrate the smartphone from everyday life [25].…”

“It’s About Missing Much More Than the People”: How Students use Digital Technologies to Alleviate Homesickness

“…(P38) This behaviour of creating an 'open channel' has been noted in other studies of video-mediated communication [31,60]. For the problem of homesickness, having an open channel may help to recreate the type of conversational flow that exists in the home, where people do not need to attend to each other but can remain in conversation or focus on other activities [60]. An additional and perhaps more interesting outcome of establishing an open channel was the idea that the channel could prevent loneliness while providing a sense of awareness about happenings at the remote site, especially with respect to ambient sounds.…”

“…It feels nice. " (P38) This behaviour of creating an 'open channel' has been noted in other studies of video-mediated communication [31,60]. For the problem of homesickness, having an open channel may help to recreate the type of conversational flow that exists in the home, where people do not need to attend to each other but can remain in conversation or focus on other activities [60].…”

Large Scale Analysis of Multitasking Behavior During Remote Meetings

“…While multitasking during one's own work mostly impacts personal productivity, special consideration of multitasking during meetings is warranted, as this can additionally impact other colleagues and their productivity [31]. Past work has looked at how people engage in multitasking both during in-person meetings and presentations [6,30,31], as well as online collaborative activities, such as remote meetings leveraging subjective feedback or perceptions [45,62]. For example, in educational settings, the use of laptops during a lecture has been shown to have a negative impact on attention, where students tend to engage in activities such as web-surfng or emailing rather than activities related to the lecture [6,30].…”

“…. Prior work has investigated how people engage in multitasking during collaborative activities such as meetings and video chats, both in-person and online [30,31,45,62]. However, these works are mainly based on small-scale qualitative studies, and to the best of our knowledge, no research to date has reported systematic and comprehensive evidence from large populations.…”