How families use video communication: Technologies during intergenerational skype sessions

Geographical distances between family members have propelled the use of video communication technologies (e.g., Skype, FaceTime) to maintain and facilitate family relationships. Skype enables access to a visual on the screen, and the use of wireless technology (WiFi) facilitates Skype sessions to be mobile and to occur in various spaces in the family home. This chapter examines an extended sequence of talk during a Skype session between young children, their mother, and grandparents. Interactions were video-recorded and then transcribed using the Jeffersonian system. Analysis of the sequences establishes first how children and adults manage the affordances of the Skype technology to accomplish the social activity and, second, how the adults support the children’s interaction and how prosody and gesture accomplish the interaction. This chapter contributes understandings of how social orders (Unravelling the fabric of social order in block area. In Hester S, Francis D (eds) Local educational order: ethnomethodological studies of knowledge in action. John Benjamins Pub. Co., Amsterdam, pp 91–140, 2000) are assembled during family Skype sessions.