ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the domestication of video call technology, to attune the domestication approach. With a focus on the adoption of Zoom during COVID-19 lockdowns, it considers how householders negotiated these ‘screen worlds’ for work and also socialising at a distance to sustain familial, friendship, community ties and caregiving. The micro-dynamics of remote face-to-face interactions from home are examined by focusing on three constituents that inform domestication. First, quantitative survey data indicate patterns of household adoption and use of this emerging screen-based interactive technology. Second, an affordances approach explains the potentials and constraints of these interactive tools designed to sustain a new mode of trans-domestic communication. With an emphasis on ‘agency scripts,’ the techno-social affordances and constraints that guide video calling practices are pinpointed. Zoom redesigned its affordances in response to householders’ appropriation, re-socialisation and domestication of video call technology for non-work purposes. This suggests a contra-flow of techno-social affordances. Third, Knorr Cetina’s dual concepts of scopic mediation and synthetic situations are drawn on to enhance the affordances approach by explaining how the intervention of the screen – denoting remote phenomena as situationally present – reconstructs the interactive ‘situation.’ Affirmative and negative attributes of video calling are thereby uncovered. Drawing on Goffman’s dramatology, the final section reveals the gendered and classed dynamics involved in contestations over domestic space via the exposure of domestic backdrops in video calls. Overall, by supporting non-present face-to-face encounters, video technology’s interactive logic and visual attributes impinge on the moral economy of the household.
