Yesterday, I was waiting to meet someone at a coffee shop and was looking around, bored. I noted unsurprisingly, that half the people were on their cell phones. I was intrigued, however, by the girls sitting next to me. They looked like they were in their early twenties and they were having a video call with a boy using a cell phone. The girls took turns talking with the boy but interestingly they spoke very little; instead, looking at the boy’s face on the screen, they rapidly used their thumbs, engaging in a text conversation.<\/p>\n
That struck me as being very weird- is it faster for them to text than talk? I was puzzling over this thought in my head- if that were indeed true, what an evolutionary milestone in communication that would be! My curiosity finally got the better of me and when they were over with the phone call, I asked them why they were texting instead of talking.<\/p>\n
The answer turned to out to be a simple one- result of technology and etiquette. The girls said that in video phoning, they had to speak a little louder for the phone to catch their voice since they were holding the phones in front of their face; not directly next to their mouth. Because of this, it was more difficult to hold private conversations and they didn’t want to disturb the people around them.<\/p>\n
-But then why not have a regular conversation instead of a video one? Isn’t video phoning more expensive?
\n-Yes, but he wanted to see my friend too.<\/p>\n
Ah yes, video phoning makes it very difficult to lie about where you are and whom you are with. Not that people do…or do they?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday, I was waiting to meet someone at a coffee shop and was looking around, bored. I noted unsurprisingly, that half the people were on their cell phones. I was intrigued, however, by the girls sitting next to me. They looked like they were in their early twenties and they were having a video call […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4246],"tags":[4289,4288],"class_list":["post-33","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mobile-culture","tag-korean-mobile-trend","tag-video-phoning"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yvettewohn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yvettewohn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yvettewohn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yvettewohn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2019"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yvettewohn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yvettewohn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yvettewohn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yvettewohn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yvettewohn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}