Abstract
This article discusses a small-scale study that explores how members of one family based in Australia and the United Kingdom use remote technology to develop and maintain family relationships across generations and distance. Of particular interest was the manner in which Skype computer software was mediated to develop intersubjectivity between a 4-year-old girl and her grandparents. Encounters were filmed, transcribed and coded; participants were interviewed and asked to keep reflective diaries. Analysis showed that all the adults scaffolded the child’s interactions to sustain communication and help her negotiate meaning with her grandparents as virtual partners, but that she also took on a leadership role by appropriating the affordances of the medium to incorporate them in her play in creative ways.
Mummy, I want to carry grandma and grandpa to my bedroom
Oh yes please. Millie, why do we have to be carried?
Because you can’t walk
Why can’t we walk?
Because you you haven’t got any legs
Oh really
And why haven’t we got any legs
Because your legs are down there
This conversation between Millie in Sydney, Australia, and her grandparents in London, United Kingdom, took place when Millie was 4.4 years old. Her parents had involved her in using Skype, a form of videoconferencing, to communicate over distance, since she was 2 years old and she was accustomed to the medium that displayed the faces of her grandparents on the screen. She was also used to seeing them in photographs and in person about once a year. This article explores the distinctive ways in which Millie and her grandparents, one of whom is the researcher, used Skype to develop intersubjectivity across a distance of 12,000 miles. As remote technology software, Skype retains the immediacy of face-to-face communication but lacks many other elements of embodied interaction, as Millie’s comment above shows.
Introduction
Children across the world are growing up at a time when new communication technologies are becoming more easily available to some families and communities (International Telecommunications Union, 2012). In an increasingly globalised world, where migration is becoming more commonplace, finding ways of maintaining relationships with close, extended family members becomes problematic. The development of computer technology and the availability of free software such as Skype, which enable remote communication over temporal and spatial distance, mean that the computer can potentially be used in some homes for maintaining family relationships across geographical and generational boundaries.
Skype is an Internet phone service with a video component that enables users to see each other on screen in real time. It requires access to a reliable Internet connection, a computer, camera and microphone facilities. The use of Skype has grown dramatically since its creation in 2003, and it is now the largest provider of cross-border voice communications (Taylor, 2011). Skype and other software such as iChat or SightSpeed build on earlier technologies by extending the scope for interaction and connectivity across spaces and time zones. In common with the telephone, it offers the immediacy of instantaneous communication over distance, but its demands for multimodal expression expand the possibilities of the form so that movement, gaze, gesture and other visual features of joint meaning-making are integral to its use. It is precisely this facility that makes it more accessible to very young children, than, for example, the telephone. Expansion in types and availability of technology over the last 30 years means that computer media are more commonplace in homes and have impacted the social and cultural practices of adults and children (Meadows, 2010; Plowman et al., 2012; Rideout et al., 2003). Therefore, children’s experiences and interactions with technology in the home have become an arena worthy of study.
Children’s engagement with new technology has generated debate and commentary about its accessibility, use and the potential effects on children’s communicative practices, performance of social identities and cognitive development. Changes in the technological landscape have altered the environments in which children grow and develop and created new social worlds that require negotiation (Johnson and Puplampu, 2008). Research over the past 10 years has examined children’s familiarity with and uses of new technology in a range of forms. Studies have looked at the effect of the Internet as a new social environment and its effect upon adolescents and primary aged children (Burnett and Wilkinson, 2005; Johnson, 2010; Linebarger and Chernin, 2003), their engagement with computer games (Pelletier, 2009) and social networking sites (Dowdall, 2009).
As the availability of new technology has grown, studies have also focused on young children’s experiences at home and the ways in which the skills and knowledge they have developed are reflected in pedagogical approaches in early years settings. Marsh et al. (2005) audited young children’s access to and use of new technology in the Digital Beginnings project and found that popular culture, media and new technologies were embedded in their home lives and that, from a young age, they were engaged in related practices, often supported by family members. More recently, O’Hara (2011) examined the incidences and availability of information and communication technology (ICT) for 4 to 5-year-old children. He looked at their experiences of an extensive range of technology: showing their variable but developing knowledge of the equipment and making links to the skills and knowledge that they brought to school.
Marsh (2010) explored young children’s play with avatars in virtual worlds demonstrating their agency and creativity in engaging with and exploring the possibilities of the medium. She also found contingent activities such as self-initiated online social networking and other opportunities for literacy practices related to their play. The significance of new technologies for young children’s literacy development particularly in relation to popular culture is also well documented (Kenner, 2000, 2004; Kelly, 2010; Levy, 2011; Marsh, 2004, 2011).
These studies have drawn attention to the role of family members in scaffolding young children’s familiarity with new technology and their efforts to incorporate it in their play. Marsh et al. (2005) found that parents in their study demonstrated positive attitudes to new technologies from implicitly modelling its uses to actively engaging in activities with their children that enabled them to explore the medium and accomplish their own goals. This support relates to extended family members and intergenerational learning. Kenner et al. (2007, 2008) drew attention to the role grandparents can play in structuring opportunities for learning that extend beyond the focus of the computer to wider cultural and linguistic elements. They also explored collaborative learning with a computer and demonstrated the mutuality of the experience as both child and grandparent shared their own distinctive knowledge.
Studies have shown how young children participate in joint meaning-making with communicative partners in their play with telephones (Gillen et al., 2005). But little is known about how young children engage with Skype in the context of their lives and how interactions with members of their family over distance contribute to their social worlds. This article will consider the affordances of remote communication technology such as Skype for adults and children to co-construct social relations over generational and geographical boundaries. It will examine the processes by which they participate in valued cultural activity and explore a young child’s participation and appropriation of the mediational practices that surround the use of the hardware and software.
Theoretical frameworks
The study is located in a sociocultural framework that situates children’s learning in social relationships with important members of their cultural communities (Vygotsky, 1978). Vygotsky believed that particular resources or cultural tools, developed over generations, were at the heart of learning and resulted in transformations that shaped their future use. Cultural tools not only link people to those who have gone before them but also enable developments to take place. Wertsch (1995) explains how material and psychological tools or ‘mediational means’ shape thought and communication in communities and explain learning. In this study, the material resources of the computer and software have no inherent meaning without the social and cultural processes, including the participants’ mediational language and action, that surround their use and give them significance.
The metaphor of scaffolding, proposed by Wood et al. (1976), described actions that could support the development of skills and understanding by reducing the complexities of a task or routine and simplifying the learner’s role. More recently, Gregory (2001) and Kenner et al. (2007) argued that ‘synergy’ was a more appropriate term for a process that involved contingency by all participants in an atmosphere of trust and mutuality. Plowman and Stephen (2007) extend the scaffolding metaphor to take account of the distinctive ways that adults can support learning with technology. Their notion of ‘guided interaction’ recognises the dynamic, reciprocal, dialogic relationship between children and more competent partners that characterises scaffolding but involves recognition of the wider setting, an enhanced range of communicative strategies and less formal, play-based approaches where the outcome is not necessarily the successful accomplishment of a task.
Rogoff (1990, 2003) argued that children’s learning can only be understood in the light of the particular cultural practices and circumstances of their communities. Moreover, her work showed that far from being passive participants, children although less experienced partners, were actively involved in co-constructing meaning and influencing interactions with family members in day-to-day circumstances with familiar cultural resources. She identified three planes on which this development took place: apprenticeship, guided participation and participatory appropriation. The apprenticeship metaphor relates to the Vygotskian notion of individuals as novices participating with more experienced others in activity that is valued by a group or community, leading to the accomplishment of shared cultural goals. Rogoff’s model of guided participation moves away from Vygotsky’s emphasis on instructional contexts to less formal arrangements, stressing interactions that can take place in more observatory modes. The focal point of this model is how participants collaboratively manage interactions or interpersonal engagements to adjust and accommodate behaviour on both sides in relation to the goals of the activity. Participatory appropriation relates to the changes individuals experience as a result of the interpretations involved in collaborative participation, even where the relationship may be asymmetrical. Rogoff (1995) concurs with Vygotsky that the dynamic nature of the involvement in a shared activity results in adjustments in participants’ understanding and adaptations in their roles that will be applied to the same activity in the future, so that learning is appropriated rather than merely utilised.
This study is also informed by the sociology of childhood, which offers a new paradigm (Corsaro, 2005; James, 2009; James and Prout, 1997), challenging normative models of children as apprentice adults, reflecting adult concerns, moving in stages towards adult competencies. Within this discourse, childhood is conceptualised as a construction rather than a universal category and as such related to social and cultural factors. While acknowledging the developmental differences and power relationships that exist between adults and children, this more contemporary understanding legitimates children’s participation in society in their own right. They are seen as independent, competent actors who have agency in creating their own social worlds and relations within the boundaries of their experience.
This agency extends to their uses of technology (Hutchby and Moran-Ellis, 1998, 2001). They are not passive recipients of the affordances of computers or other technological tools and materials but can act upon them, often in collaboration with peers and adults in a relationship that is mutually constitutive (Marsh, 2010; Plowman et al., 2012; Prout, 2001).
Methodology
This study is part of an ongoing longitudinal research project that examines how joint interaction is determined and intersubjectivity (Trevarthen and Aitken, 2001; Zlatev et al., 2008) develops between three young children in two families living in Sydney, Australia, and one set of grandparents in London, United Kingdom, who regularly use Skype to communicate. It examines the way communicative events or activities are negotiated in relation to use of remote technology; how the children’s awareness of a remote audience is reflected in their use of verbal language and the camera and the ways in which they relate and refer to adults and objects remotely.
Research questions addressed in the wider research project are as follows:
How and for what purposes is Skype used in a family and how are the affordances of the technology exploited by participants across each of the three generations?
How do adults and children co-construct the environment and create social relations over temporal and spatial distance?
How do the children use the presence and availability of Skype to both demonstrate and develop competence as social actors?
Ethnographic methods were used to obtain data that included participant observation, interview and participant diaries. Data relating to the detailed communicative exchanges through remote technology were obtained by filming and recording the grandparents’ view of the screen and transcribing and coding the material. The images on the screen were mostly but not exclusively of the participants who were speaking at the time, particularly the adults. The faces and upper torsos of the grandparents who generally remained seated in front of their computer in the United Kingdom appeared in a small box on the lower left-hand side of the screen. The main display represented the view from the camera in Australia and constantly changed to focus on the children or their parents. The children’s play facilitated the need to move between rooms that resulted in constant repositioning of the camera, normally by their mother, to focus on them or the objects of their attention, resulting in a fluidity of movement that gave a variability to the images on the screen in the United Kingdom.
Informal semi-structured interviews were carried out with each adult participant, mostly by phone or on Skype for the Australian participants and, in addition, one face-to-face embodied interview in Australia. The participants were encouraged to keep a diary of their impressions and reflections of Skype encounters.
Ethnographic methods depend fundamentally on first-hand personal involvement in the lives of people who are being studied (Eisenhart, 2001). Recognising that one is part of the research is an accepted element of ethnography (Denzin, 1997); the interactionist perspective that underpins it dictates it could be no other way since there is no objective knowledge in the social world. In her introduction to autoethnography, Ellis (2003) comments that viewing the analysis of data as social constructivism allows for ‘multiple interpretations of social realities and collaborative creation of knowledge by the viewer and the viewed’ (p. 29). In this study, the author is the children’s grandmother and therefore both an insider/the viewed and an outsider/the viewer. However, such a conception of binary positions is problematic and belies the complexities involved in the dynamic relationship between the two. Social researchers will both have an effect on the community they are investigating and draw on their knowledge of the social world when analysing data (Coffey, 1999; Hammersley, 2007), but in doing so, they will also need to distance themselves from it (Eppley, 2006). Insider–outsider roles are therefore seen as more temporary and precarious than absolute categories might suggest. Labaree (2002) argues that all researchers have to negotiate shared positions with participants (p. 116). Traditionally, this requires ‘going native’, but for insiders, the corollary is ‘going observationalist’ to apply distance introspectively from the phenomena being observed. In this study, I constantly moved between participating in the Skype episodes as insider and outsider. As a family member, I had access to the social world of Skype encounters, a shared relationship and a previous knowledge that informed my position as a participant, but simultaneously in my researcher’s persona, I perceived these interactions with young children as an area for investigation. Analysing the data demanded not only reflexivity but also the creation of a reflective distance that did not deny my positioning as an insider.
This article relates to one family of two parents and two children, Millie, aged 3.7–4.4 years, and her brother Max, aged 1.6–2.3 years, during the period of enquiry. It focuses predominantly on how Millie used Skype as a social event to engage with her mother, grandparents and younger brother in the co-construction of joint interaction and activity to create shared purpose, focus and understanding.
An adapted multimodal analysis (Kress et al., 2001; Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2006) was adopted to reveal as far as possible, the different ways that meaning was made orally, aurally and through gaze and gesture. The limitations of the technology meant that the direction of each computer’s integral camera dictated what could be seen by the researcher in London and that any contextual information occurring off-camera was not available. Access to such data would be facilitated through filming encounters, in particular in the children’s home, but this was not possible at this stage of the study.
Analysis and findings
Close analysis of episodes involving interactions between Millie, her brother Max, their mother and grandparents have revealed three key insights:
Millie was aware of Skype encounters as a distinctive form of communication with her grandparents.
Adults scaffolded her use of Skype to sustain communication and help her negotiate meaning with her grandparents as virtual partners.
She showed agency in creatively involving her grandparents in her play and took the lead in devising ways of using the screen, which adults had not thought of.
Millie was aware of Skype encounters as a distinctive form of communication with her grandparents
There were typically spaces where Skype encounters occurred. Initially, these were determined by the place inhabited by the laptop computer in the home and the logistics of unplugging it to move to another room. The children’s bedroom was a favourite space because it enabled toys to be shown and Millie’s favourite activity of jumping on the bed to take place. The family’s purchase of an iPad enabled more fluidity of movement, so that the whole house became a site for interaction. Millie’s references to her grandparents as embodied and capable of movement were frequently reinforced by them with such questions as: Where are we going Millie; Can we go in the bedroom? and emphasised by Millie: We’re going to somewhere we haven’t been yet.
The technology enabled a link to be made directly and immediately between the participants on screen and their embodied states despite the spatial and temporal distance that separated them. When she was younger, Millie would often ask for or point to a photograph of one or both of her grandparents during a Skype episode, demonstrating her understanding of the connection with the images on the screen. Later, prompted by a question, but sometimes unaided, she would talk about activities they had engaged in when they were together in the United Kingdom or Australia. The grandparents often showed artefacts, such as toys or books they had shared together in embodied encounters, to remind the children of the connection.
However, Millie’s appeals for her grandparents to join her in particular spaces revealed her understanding that they did not have the same physical agency or independence of movement during Skype encounters as in their embodied state. When she initiated an engagement in a new space, her requests for action were directed to her mother who held the computer, rather than to her grandparents:
I want grandma & grandpa to sit on the floor with me. Can grandma & grandpa come upstairs? Mum, can grandma and grandpa come over here? I want grandma and grandpa to play jumping.
Using the technology cooperatively had given Millie access to new ways of interacting with her grandparents, which were different to embodied in-person encounters that took place in Sydney or the United Kingdom and demanded alternative, more abstract ways of constructing them (Wertsch, 1995).
Millie’s younger brother Max had not yet understood the distinctive nature of Skype and his attempts to apply normative interactional strategies to virtual encounters were apparent in his more tactile interactions that involved kissing grandparents’ faces on screen, stroking them and offering them a drink from his cup. These actions had the impact of turning off the iPad that had a touch-sensitive screen, and Millie as the older, more experienced participant had learned to avoid them.
Adults scaffolded Millie’s use of Skype to sustain communication and help her negotiate meaning with her grandparents as virtual partners
The Skype encounters, which were normally of approximately an hour’s duration, were agreed in advance by the adults, to accommodate the temporal distance between London and Sydney. Both the children and adults had to negotiate the distinctive nature of Skype if successful communication was to take place as these encounters were different to normal embodied interactions. For example, the lack of tactile experience, the dependence on the camera for visual information, including non-verbal communication, frequent problems with the connection and long pauses where nothing happened as the sound or picture quality was being rectified demanded a different set of behaviours. The technical difficulties in particular took the focus from the communication process to the medium that facilitated it.
The concentrated nature and timing of communicative encounters and limited access to non-verbal information meant that gaps and silences were avoided in the way that they might be present in normal interactions (Cameron, 2001), and all the adults were involved in maintaining the children’s engagement, continuing the conversational flow and sustaining the dynamics of the remote relationship, by modelling appropriate activities and conversational topics and by actively involving Millie in the interactions (Rogoff et al., 1998). The questions below, from one Skype encounter, but typical of many, served to retain the momentum of the interaction by inviting dialogue and fostering responses from the children that suggested new trajectories of action or involved toys or other props as items of focal interest.
What did you want to say? What are you going to show grandma and grandpa? Is there anything else you want to show them? Show us your favourite toy Millie.
During a Skype encounter, Millie undertook a range of interactive roles, both active and passive, supported by the adults. Figure 1 represents her activity with her grandparents on the screen in one episode when she was 3 years 7 months. Her behaviour ranged from passive non-responses to questions for information, to self-initiated activity such as suggesting a game, to performing a dance and singing songs and proactively asking her grandparents questions with no prompts from adults.
Roles undertaken by Millie (aged 3.7 years) in one Skype encounter.
Millie regularly observed and participated in Skype encounters as a familiar cultural activity valued by her family. The adults collaborated to structure her participation through joint activity, to support mutual understanding and engagement by creating common foci around which patterns of interaction could take place. They used language to signal a common perspective and to enable communicative exchange in an atmosphere of mutuality. Despite the frequent laughter and playful engagement that characterised these encounters, the adults were working hard to manage Millie’s involvement and participation as a communicative partner.
It’s hard work for the adult at the children’s end; following them around, holding camera at the right angle, helping children to stay engaged for block period when this may be at a time that doesn’t always suit them and maintain ‘the flow’ for both sides. (Mother’s journal entry)
Maintaining ‘the flow’ extended beyond camera manoeuvres. An analysis of the adults’ language during the same hour-long encounter, demonstrates the ways in which they were seeking to find a common perspective that would engage Millie’s interest and initiate or sustain communication. The number of turns indicates the extent to which each of these language uses was represented in this episode (Figure 2).
Adults’ use of language to scaffold communication in one Skype encounter.
The adults made their actions and comments contingent on their interpretation of what Millie would be interested in, how she had participated in previous Skype encounters or what her current preoccupation or focus of attention appeared to be. They were ‘leading by following’ (Wood, 1998) constantly seeking a perspective around which to generate a common focus of interest or elaborate on an existing one. This mostly involved asking questions (Are you going to Junior Jivers this morning?), prompting actions (Show grandma and grandpa the tape measure) or clarifying meanings (You want to sing another song?). The mother’s language also had a regulatory function as she strived to keep the children’s attention on the distinctive nature of the communication that gave it an urgency for the adults, which was not necessarily shared by the children. If you want to speak to them, you’d better hurry up.
These encounters were typically highly concentrated because of time constraints, the need to keep communication flowing and the disembodiment of one set of partners. The interactions between participants were characterised by their general fluidity and unpredictability as the children and their mother moved around the room, other family members and visitors passed through, people addressed each other off-camera and the young children experimented with sound and movement, while engaged in play and normal day-to-day activities carried out in front of or away from the screen.
Participants frequently spoke at the same time as it is less easy in this medium, than in embodied interactions, to recognise the non-verbal cues or grasp the prosodic nuances that suggest someone is going to initiate or complete an exchange. The children typically, squabbled over toys, ran off to another room, demanded their mother’s attention, spilt drinks, and fell over as well as negotiated who was going to stand in front of the camera. Max was still learning that unlike in embodied encounters, if he moved away from the camera, he would be out of the vision of the interactive partners. All of these elements must be negotiated while striving to maintain communicative focus with the disembodied faces on the screen. The distilled quality of these encounters meant that the children in this study often needed time out from such a demanding interactive process and would habitually become distracted in the middle of an exchange, wander off to play alone, look at a book, have a drink or climb on the furniture, either in or out of the range of the camera, for short periods of time before they were ready to return.
The adults’ attempts to co-construct a series of interactions with Millie were guided by their purpose of developing an intergenerational mutuality over distance.
I want her to have regular contact with her extended family, so they can interact with her and keep up to date with her development and she gets to have continued contact with her grandparents and develop a relationship despite living on the other side of the world. (Mother)
But it is unlikely that Millie would share this interpretation. All participants, but particularly the adults, were involved in shaping the communicative exchanges and building a repertoire of culturally appropriate patterns of engagement, which had to be negotiated. Millie was still learning to interpret what counted as successful engagement and resisted adult suggestions for mutual focus and sometimes communication did not go smoothly. The interaction represented in figure 3, which took place when Millie was 3 years 7 months, shows how she ignores the adults’ prompts to talk about a ‘show and tell’ activity she had taken part in at day care, choosing to role-play it instead, (see Figure 3).
The adults attempt to support Millie’s interactions.
The adults attempt to support Millie’s interaction through both verbal and non-verbal means; her mother uses touch and gaze to encourage her to speak, and her invitation to Millie to sit on her lap is ignored. The grandparents smile into the camera and move closer to it to promote a response, but Millie remains silent, staring ahead for several turns and they move back away from the camera when she does respond. Her interest is revived and her agency is plain in her initiation of the role-play activity of ‘show and tell’, a new development for a Skype encounter for these participants. The adults, whose verbalisations were contingent on Millie’s responses, adjusted their expectations, signalled their interest through both verbal and non-verbal means (Plowman and Stephen, 2007) and proceeded to contribute to the game in which the mother became the teacher and the grandparents were the other children in the class. Such self-initiated activities arose from Millie’s interests and concerns and enabled her to sustain communication through play.
She showed agency in creatively involving her grandparents in her play and took the lead in devising ways of using the screen, that adults had not thought of
Millie also engaged in physical play with her grandparents, supported by her mother who held the computer housing the internal camera. The children’s bedroom was the most common site for such play and jumping was a repeated and routinised activity, either as a performance by Millie for her grandparents or as a joint enterprise. Millie would typically initiate the activity with introductory appeals addressed to her grandparents, ‘Let’s do some jumping together’ or ‘Can you come and play in my room?’ or addressed to her mother as custodian of the camera, ‘I want to do jumping with grandma and grandpa’. On these occasions, she climbed on the bed, and her mother placed the computer at the other end and supported her play by manipulating the camera, so that the grandparents appeared to Millie to be jumping too.
The laptop computer was modelled by Millie’s mother as a tool that could be incorporated in Millie’s play. The faces on the screen were a symbolic representation of the adults’ total physical forms, and this representation was reinforced by them by behaving as though they were engaging in these activities in person. Millie’s mother and grandparents scaffolded the play activity to make it possible for her to engage with them as she would if they had been present, by behaving as though they were.
Over time, Millie routinely involved her grandparents on screen in her imaginative play, taking over control of the camera and leading the activities. She took more responsibility in the co-construction of communicative relations by initiating activities independently and leading the adults in her games.
Incorporating the camera into physical play was evident in games of ‘hide and seek’, a favourite collaborative activity that gained the status of a ritual by being present in most Skype encounters during the period of observation. Patterns of activity were repeated and a common script developed, which, as will be shown, was eventually appropriated by Millie. The interaction in figure 4, recorded when Millie was 3.11.years and her brother Max was 1.10 years, was typical of these games.
Millie suggests playing ‘hide & seek’.
The game is initiated by Millie who outlines the rules. It is clear from her reference to yous twos that although her mother holds the computer and is physically in the room, the instructions and the game are intended for her grandparents. Her brother Max is also a participant, moving from his position in front of the camera to copy Millie’s actions, repeating the rhythm and intonation of her vocalisation and learning alongside her as the children hide together under the duvet.
Once the counting has ended and the children have hidden in the customary place, a familiar pattern of language and series of actions developed (Figure 5).
Hide and seek: the familiar pattern of language.
The computer is used as an integral part of the game. Even when Millie cannot see it, the pretence is upheld, as the children’s mother directs the camera at the places they are not hiding, making the game more real for the grandparents too. When she was found, Millie was able to look beyond the computer as mediational means to make the connection with and refer to her grandparents as embodied: don’t find me. This interactive, routinised activity, initiated by the children and supported by the adults, provided a model for how to play ‘hide and seek’, partly through the adoption of a script that both described the action and provided a framework for verbal turn-taking (Rogoff et al., 1998).
A month later, Millie drew on the familiar hide-and-seek routine and accompanying patterned language to initiate a new game where this time her grandparents hid and she looked for them.
The grandparents hide and Millie finds them.
Millie’s participation changed from a more passive role of hiding, to taking responsibility for managing the activity. She appropriated the mediational means of the computer to accomplish her own goals, which were accommodated by the adults but not suggested by them. Their actions were contingent upon her behaviour. Indeed from an adult perspective, hiding an iPad screen displaying disembodied faces would not be countenanced as a viable activity.
Millie is supported by repeating the script that has become so familiar to her as part of the dialogue involved in playing ‘hide and seek’. It is echoed by her little brother, who sometimes answers her questions. ‘Are they hide behind the light?’ ‘No’. The routinised language guides her thinking and her actions as she searches for the adults. When she finds the computer and her grandparents’ faces, her retort ‘Here you are’ is directed at them and not at her mother who is in the room, and like her, facing the computer. She is initiating her brother into the game (Gregory, 2001), and at the end, he knows to smile at his grandparents’ faces on the computer too.
Millie showed agency in incorporating her grandparents in her imaginative play when she was 3.8 years. The following extract (see figure 7) took place in the familiar space of the children’s bedroom. Millie was sitting on the bed talking to her grandparents on the iPad screen, while Max aged 1.7 years was having his nappy changed next to her.
Taking the lead from Millie’s non-verbal signals, the grandmother asked about the plaster she had on her leg, but Millie’s plan was to play ‘going camping’, and her mother and grandparents demonstrated the contingency of their responses by participating in the game, taking their lead from her and making suggestions, Is it night-time? Millie used gaze, gesture and language to incorporate her grandparents in her play as the computer was placed next to her under a blanket, transcending any idea that their bodies were separated. Immediately following this episode and against Millie’s wishes, Max tried to join in and the game came to a swift end.
The pleasure and enjoyment demonstrated by the participants’ facial expressions, the light hearted tone of their voice and frequent laughter characterises the warmth of the playful encounters between the partners in developing the mutuality and intersubjectivity that is the overall goal of the adult participants.
Although they were all seasoned users of computers, none of the adults had experience of Skype before Millie was born and so they were developing their understanding of its possibilities and constraints alongside her. They were comparative novices in managing the imperfect technology and often struggled with breaks in communication, poor pictures and sound. They were not yet fully competent users of Skype and were learning with the children how to adapt embodied communicative practices to the novel forms available through the technology.
Unlike Millie, the adults had a deep familiarity with the norms and expectations of face-to-face social interaction in developing intersubjectivity to guide them, informed by use of the telephone for negotiating remote communication. The development of Skype as a new multimodal mediational means required a different set of interactional skills to develop reciprocity. The adults were becoming acculturated too, learning alongside the children about the new technology and its possibilities (Prensky, 2001). But in many ways, the adults were learning from Millie about the affordances of the medium, by following her lead and engaging in novel forms of play, incorporating the screen, initiated by her.
Discussion
This article has given a snapshot of how participants engage as active social agents in an authentic setting, using the affordances of the computer and remote software to co-construct a mutual environment and social relations at a distance. In particular, it has considered how Millie used the presence and availability of Skype to engage in playful encounters for her own purposes, with support from adults who were themselves becoming accustomed to the interactional demands of the medium.
Over time and in ritualised ways, she was supported in making sense of and contributing to the social environment through social practices and patterns of interaction that were adapted to the medium (Johnson and Puplampu, 2008). She was an apprentice learning to develop reciprocity both with her mother and brother who were physically present and with her grandparents who were not (Rogoff, 1995). The adults cooperated in mediating the technology for her through dialogue, but their attention, interest, laughter and pleasure in participating, signalled in other non-verbal ways, created mutual focus and understanding and facilitated her social development (Plowman et al., 2010). But Millie did not necessarily share the adults’ purpose and turns were often asymmetrical, leading them to abandon one line of support and adopt new strategies that were contingent on her behaviour. As a result, she built a repertoire of culturally appropriate practices for involvement in Skype encounters. More critically, she did not just internalise adults’ use of the computer but devised creative and imaginative ways of incorporating her remote partners in her play, acting on and appropriating the affordances of the computer and software for her own purposes (Rogoff, 1995). She asserted herself as a leader in initiating forms of play that adults had not thought of and they in turn, engaged in following her lead.
Long-distance relationships traditionally constructed through letter or phone calls involve modalities of speech and writing and are less accessible to young children and more likely to be under the control of adults. Skype potentially enables the creation of relationships through action, gesture and gaze. Millie’s avoidance of touching the iPad screen demonstrated her understanding that her grandparents do not physically exist on the computer. Rather, she involved them in her play in ways that the adults, already acculturated to practices surrounding the use of computers, would not have thought of, by, for example, inviting them to hide as faces on the iPad in a game of ‘hide and seek’ or incorporating them remotely in her imaginative play.
From a Vygotskian perspective, Millie’s involvement in social activity facilitated her mental development. The understanding she displayed of the distinctive nature of Skype encounters with disembodied partners and her initiation of new ways of interacting with them that grew from the circumstances of her environment are evidence of cognitive growth.
The technology, as a cultural tool, was a means by which the family stayed in contact and it facilitated a valued cultural practice that involved Millie. But in addition to understanding the purposes of Skype, she was also discovering its possibilities (Corsaro, 2005) and she showed agency in cooperation with others in contributing to cultural change.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.