Relationships are hard work. They take time, effort, and patience. Throw in geographic separation and they become even harder to maintain. "Intimacy in Long-Distance Relationships over Video Chat" is a research paper, done by a team of two researchers from Canada, which hopes to evaluate the effectiveness of different forms of communication used in long distance relationships. Carman Neustaedter is an assistant professor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, whose main research area is in Human-Computer Interaction. One interesting fact about Carman is that he enjoys embedding puzzles in his research papers, which he compares to Indiana Jones or DaVinci Code. Saul Greenberg is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Calgary. Saul mainly studies Human-Computer Interaction, specifically how technology plays a role in the everyday interactions of people.
Summary:
Carman and Saul devised a plan to interview a group of people in long distance relationships in order to discover how technology enhances the ability to maintain a relationship over a distance. They interviewed fourteen participants who were all in a long distance relationship and all already using technology to maintain a connection to their significant others. The participants were split by gender and some were in same-sex relationships. Most of the participants were college students, graduate students, or post-graduate researchers. The research team interviewed these participants individually in order to gain insight into how the participants were already using technology to stay connected to their significant others. Most of the participants used phone text messages as a way to stay in contact throughout the day. They would use phone calls for important or emotional conversations, or when they wanted each other's undivided attention. Finally, participants used video chat as a way to hang out and spend time with each other. Some participants would only use video chat for short conversations, but most would leave the connection open for extended periods of time while they performed everyday activities such as studying, doing laundry, or eating a meal. Furthermore, some participants would send affection through air-kisses or air-hugs. Less than half of the participants used video chat as a way to satisfy sexual desires, and the other half stated that shyness or privacy issues were the reason why they did not. One of the main things that people agreed upon is that video chat allowed body language queues to enhance the conversation.
Related Work:
There is a lot of related work done in the area of human interaction via digital devices. One of the main areas of concern regarding digital communication is privacy. Here are some related papers that investigate digital privacy further: "Over-exposed? Privacy patterns and considerations in online and mobile photo sharing," "Primitive emotional contagion," "Unpacking 'privacy' for a networked world," and "The taste of privacy: An analysis of college student privacy settings in an online social network." Another main area of related research is studying the effect of Facebook and emotions on relationships. Some papers that focus on this subject are: "The impact Facebook rituals can have on a romantic relationship," "Public displays of connection," and "More information than you ever wanted: Does Facebook bring out the green eyed monster of jealousy." Finally, some researchers focus on the actual creation of software and hardware devices that might enhance the quality of digital communication in: "Tangible interfaces for remote collaboration and communication," "ComTouch: design of a vibrotactile communication device," and "Emotional touch: a novel interface to display emotional tactile information to a palm."
Evaluation:
Carman and Saul only used qualitative and subjective forms of evaluation to measure effectiveness of different forms of digital communication in long distance relationships. This was mainly because they were studying the users' level of acceptance of preexisting technologies used in communication with significant others in long distance relationships. They would personally interview participants, either in person or via video chat, and ask open ended questions about different digital communication technologies and what role they played in maintaining relationships when separated geographically.
Discussion:
I picked this paper as my final paper reading blog because it relates to my life. I have been dating the same girl for over nine years and we have been faced with distance boundaries before. Of the nine summers that we have spent together, we have spent five of them in different cities, or sometimes states. We also spent one whole year apart when I started college a year before her. In the early part of our relationship, video chatting was not as readily available, so we stuck to phone calls. In more recent summers we have used video chatting to varying levels. One area of frustration for a lot of video chat users is connection speed issues. This paper mentions this, but it does not focus on this issue as a main point of research. I believe that video chatting is great because it allows users to view and interpret contextual clues, which can drastically change how messages are interpreted. For example body language can show comprehension, confusion, anger, sadness, tiredness, etc. This information is lost when talking over the phone alone. However, I sometimes got very frustrated when bad connections caused conversations to be cut short, or damaged. This paper did a great job of evaluating thoughts and feelings of preexisting technologies, but did not focus on ways of improvement. Most of the related work focused on internet privacy, Facebook interactions, or ways of improving digital communication, rather than user's level of acceptance of preexisting technologies on long distance relationships. Therefore, I believe that this paper is novel because of the way it combines ideas, but is lacking in suggestions for improvement.
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