Integrating Local and Remote Worlds Through Channel Blending

Once upon a *me, long, long ago, people communicated and socialized in curious ways. 1

They wrote whole paragraphs at a *me – some*mes more -‐-‐ and sent them through email, delighted that the recipient might read their message that very day! 2

They waited un*l they had taken 24 or even 36 photos before geFng them printed on paper.. 3

Then they’d get together with people in person and tell the stories depicted in the photos. 4

And some*mes, also when they were in the same room together, they watched a single video for two whole hours at a stretch. 5

People listened to 12 songs by the same ar*st -‐-‐ all in a row -‐-‐ stored on preKy silver disks. 6

Now, of course, the world has changed. -‐  Content now comes in bite-‐size pieces: status updates and text tweets, 3 minute videos, and people send one photo at a *me. -‐  People capture their experiences in many more ways than just photos and videos. Now they track their loca*ons, their exercise and food intake, their game playing, even their sleeping paKerns. -‐  They access this content from just about anywhere via mobile phones, laptops, tablets, music players, ereaders, and so on. -‐  And people connect with others from almost anywhere via tex*ng, video chaFng, Facebook, TwiKer, phone calls, email, and so on -‐ We wanted to understand how all these changes have aﬀected the way people stay connected with friends and family while they’re mobile. Most ethnographic studies of mobile communica*on tend to focus on the use of a single technology, but we wanted to see how people use the whole assortment of technologies available to maintain an ongoing connec*on over the course of the day. 7

We had in mind that it might look something like this. Maybe people would have a face-‐to-‐face interac*on in the morning, then perhaps exchange emails or IMs, then later in the day maybe they send a photo or text, and then they get back together in person at the end of the day. The ques*on was, how could we study this? The best way, of course, is to be there all day so you can watch it when it happen, but this is diﬃcult. 8

Grinter & Eldridge in 2003 were interested in studying tex*ng, said they’d ideally like to “directly observe” teenagers’ text messaging prac*ces, but found “direct observa*on highly imprac*cal,” so they felt they had to use indirect approaches such as interviewing and logging. 9

Two years lager Ito & Okabe also noted that it is “notoriously diﬃcult the ﬂee*ng par*culari*es of mobile communica*on,” so they, too, studied tex*ng using “second-‐hand” methods. 10

But we started to think that things have changed since those studies were done. People are now video recording everything, everywhere – in restaurants, train sta*ons, drug stores, out on the street – so that they can post their videos on YouTube. So we though, maybe we can do it too. Maybe we can follow people around and video record them and it won’t seem that remarkable to people. We were crazy enough to try it. 11

We found four groups of close friends and family and observed each of them for half a day. Three were in diﬀerent parts of the San Francisco Bay Area, and one was split between California and Texas. To observe them, we had a diﬀerent researcher follow each person in the group as they went about their ac*vi*es over the same *me period and we watched how they stayed in touch, either through technology or in person. So we saw each person’s point of view as they connected, engaged, and disconnected. 12

These images give you a sense of how this worked. In this case, we studied two roommates who also worked together –whom we’re calling Anita and Cathy. I was following Anita, and afer work she ﬁrst drove to a shopping center where she would meet up with Cathy. 13

She did a liKle shopping, some*mes on her own, some*mes browsing together with her friend Cathy. 14

Then they came together to pay for their purchases. You can see Yutaka there video recording Cathy while I recorded Anita. 15

Then they went to dinner in a restaurant while each of them connected with other people through their phones 16

Then they split up as Anita drove to the grocery store 17

She picked up some supplies for the apartment 18

Then returned to her apartment in California and had a video chat with some friends in New York 19

while Cathy listened in from her room while also doing her own thing – and I’ll be showing you a video of this shortly 20

Then at the end of the night they got together to watch TV while surﬁng also the net and chaFng with friends on their phones. 21

What did we ﬁnd? In a nutshell, we saw a collec*on of related behaviors that we are calling channel blending. First I’ll deﬁne channel blending and then I’ll show you a few examples. Channel blending is the integra*on of interac*ons and content, over mul*ple channels – and face-‐to-‐face counts as a channel – into one coherent conversa*on. The conversa*ons usually involve both local and remote par*cipants – meaning there are mul*ple people in the room communica*ng with one or more people in a remote loca*on. Some*mes people blended channels not all at once but as they carried on a conversa*on over *me. 22

You can think of channel blending as both similar to and the opposite of mul*tasking. So on the lef, two people are face-‐to-‐face watching a basketball game while video chaFng with two others who are also watching the game. They’re looking up informa*on on their tablet and phone related to the game and maybe chaFng with someone else about the game on the laptop. So they’re using many media but converging them into one coherent conversa*on about the basketball game. On the right, you have the same configura*on of media but now there’s just one person in each space having mul*ple interac*ons. The local person is watching the game while also video chaFng with someone on the laptop, and they’re both engaged with their phones for different purposes, and the local person is also text chaFng with someone about something else. They key difference is that on the lef, there’s one conversa*on going on, and on the right there are mul*ple conversa*ons. The discussion might move on from basketball, of course, but everyone would be included as the conversa*on moved on to new topics. In the channel blending case, there are two people in the local space, and two in the remote. This was very common – to have more than one person together in one place, possibly connec*ng with mul*ple remote others in another space. 23

There were two categories of channel blending. Some*mes people channel blended interac(ons – bringing together mul*ple people across mul*ple channels. So here it’s the video chaFng, face-‐to-‐face, and text chaFng all blended together. And some*mes they channel blended content from mul*ple sources into the one conversa*on. So here it’s the game and all the things they’re looking up on their devices. 24

And of course you could have blending of both interac*ons and content in one conversa*on. 25

Now I’d like to show you a case of channel blending an interac(on over mul*ple channels. It involved Anita and Cathy when they were back at their apartment in California and Anita was chaFng with two friends in New York. In the adjacent room, Cathy was packing for a 2-‐month trip to Dublin, Ireland, where she would be running an internship program for her company. Anita, too, would soon be going to Los Angeles to run another internship program there. Here they’re talking about the upcoming travel. In it, they talk about a couple of movies involving danger in foreign ci*es called “Taken” and “Hos*le.” You’ll no*ce how Anita acts as what we call a “pivot person” to blends the two spaces together, relaying comments back and forth and keeping everyone involved in the one conversa*on. [PLAY CLIP] They key things to no*ce here are how Anita is interac*ng with people remotely and locally at the same *me, and she is integra*ng the two “channels” into one conversa*on. As the pivot person, she some*mes aKributes Cathy’s comments to her, as when she says “I love how they ask as if you have a choice” or at the end, she just integrates Cathy’s comments as her own, saying “Anita loves LA!” 26

In an earlier interac*on at dinner, they both had their phones out and they both communicated with others while s*ll talking to each other. Instead of carrying on separate conversa*ons locally and remotely, they shared with each other what they were reading or typing to others, blending the local and remote spaces into one conversa*on. This diagram shows their conversa*on over the 9 minutes before the waiter took their order. The orange are topics they generated from their current environment (things about the restaurant or work that day), and the blue are topics that emerged from interac*ons they were having on their phones. You can see how they blended them together into one interac*on. They both read aloud what they were reading, and verbalized what they were typing as they texted or responded to a tweet. So in this case, they both acted as pivot people for their interac*ons with diﬀerent remote others. We also thought it was interes*ng, as a side note, that their conversa*on – with its quick, bursty nature about many diﬀerent topics – mirrored exactly the type of online interac*ons they were having over text chat, TwiKer, Four Square, and Facebook. 27

This next example shows how people channel blended content from mul*ple sources. In this case they were all face-‐to-‐face, and they brought in content from their phones and a laptop as the conversa*on unfolded. This example is interes*ng because it also illustrates channel blending over *me. These three people are musicians and a few days before this conversa*on, the one on the lef had posted a link to a recording of a violin concerto that was played by a guy who at the *me was 15 years old. It’s a very difficult piece and it’s amazing that someone so young played it so well, but there’s one sec*on in the piece where he screws up and has trouble hiFng a high note. It’s a funny clip because of the squeaky notes. They had all played the clip on their own and laughed, but now that they got together, it comes up in conversa*on and they want to play it again. So you’ll see the woman figuring out how to access the clip on her phone, with help from the others. Afer this, they con*nue to discuss musical pieces and each of the men in turn brings out their phone to access a different song and the one on the lef opens his laptop when he can’t find it on his phone. Then he uses it to find a picture of the sheet music on Facebook. [PLAY CLIP] So each used their own devices – phones and laptops – to access content based on 28

Those are just a few of the many examples we saw, and more are described in the paper. So when we go back to our original concep*on of what we might ﬁnd when watching how people communicate throughout the day, we discovered that instead of looking like this… 29

It looks much more like this. With mul*ple people together in a shared space, communica*ng with mul*ple remote others using mul*ple devices, and sharing different types of content. We want to be clear that other have no*ced different aspects of this, like people carrying on a conversa*on with both local and remote par*cipants, or carrying on a conversa*on over *me. What we’re proposing here is that it’s useful to think of these cases as part of a larger phenomenon that involves blending different channels into one conversa*on. We think this may happen rela*vely ofen, and it’s likely that at least some of the cases that are reported as mul*tasking may actually be channel blending. 30

Now let’s think about the technology people are currently using. Most of it is designed to connect just two people, with the assump*on that they are each alone with a single device. This is the case with phone calls. 31

And with tex*ng or IM. 32

Other technology is designed for many-‐to-‐many interac*ons, but even s*ll, the assump*on is s*ll that each one is alone in their space with a single device, not sharing with people in their local space. 33

Yet, what was saw was that communica*on looked much more like this. Where you have mul*ple people in the same space, and small groups of people are trying to connect – not two people, but more like 3 or 4 or 5. Here the two men are on the phone, and she’s chiming in as he relays comments back and forth. At one point he uses his computer to enter in some informa*on they give him 34

Here she’s IM-‐ing with that same person and now she’s relaying comments back and forth. They also discuss a Words With Friends game they’ve been playing on their phones. 35

This one is a case of massive content blending – they all got together to watch a sequence of videos projected from a computer onto the TV while also looking up related informa*on on their phones and laptops. At one point they all pulled out their phones to compare their sleep cycles, which they’d all recorded with an app. 36

In this case this woman is video chaFng with her husband while also text chaFng with a woman in this IM window – and she’s relaying comments back and forth as they work together to coordinate an upcoming visit, which they had all discussed in an earlier email. 37

This one looks simple but is complicated. The daughter is talking with a friend about some documents on her screen, which he had emailed her and is asking her to print out and bring to him when they meet up later. Meanwhile, the mother is talking with another daughter – who this daughter had just been talking with before she handed her mother the phone. 38

Finally, these three sisters are having a three-‐way phone call while two of them also look at and discuss a website on their computers, but the third one can’t share in it. In fact, she then complains about the problems with sharing in this short clip. 39

So what does all mean for technology design? If people are doing a lot of channel blending, how should we be suppor*ng it? We think technology needs to support small groups of people – not just one-‐to-‐one or many-‐to-‐many Some together, some apart – not just with each person alone in separate loca*ons With fluid levels of par*cipa*on – like with the Pepper Spray example, people in the same space ofen monitor conversa*ons and engage to different degrees at different *mes As they show & tell & react to the stories of their lives, since that’s what people are doing Using mul*ple media and devices. People aren’t just using a single device at a *me or even a single device per person Over mul*ple interac*ons – people not only con*nue their conversa*ons across *me and media, they also want to re-‐share the same content when they get together face to face or afer they separate and reconnect remotely. 41

Once upon a *me, long, long ago, people communicated and socialized in curious ways. 42

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Integrating Local and Remote Worlds Through Channel Blending

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