Refiguring habits of subjectivity, communication, and space in online video calls

Abstract

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has brought profound change to many areas of our lives, and perhaps most of all in terms of how we communicate. A testament to our vital need for social connection, millions of people have sought to shed the physical constraints of isolation and restricted mobility by using online video calling to reaffirm relations with friends, colleagues and wider communities. Drawing on qualitative in-depth interviews with users of online video call platforms, this paper explores the social and subjective impacts of video calling, and how they are transforming habitual modes of relating to ourselves and others. The paper argues that grasping the impact of such technological encounters requires new modes of thinking attuned to the less conscious and more material processes though which technologies come to shape how we think and behave. In theorising these unconscious and non-representational potentials, the paper engages with Félix Ravaisson's innovative theorisation of habit. In contrast to those thinkers who would reduce habit to the unthinking and automatic repetition of the same, we explore how Ravaisson's theorisation of habit offers a dynamic ontology for understanding how bodies change and how change comes to be registered in bodies through encounters with technology. We argue that this conceptualisation of habit opens a powerful way of thinking about how the repeated use of online video calls has become bound with the production of new habits of attention, transforming the embodied ways in which we perceive and relate to our own subjectivities, other people, and the spaces in which we live and work.