Dealing with missing participants in the opening phases of a videoconference

Abstract

The paper explores the social interaction that takes place during the initial phases of videoconferences. The focus is on the problem of absent participants, which is often considered a reason for delaying the official beginning of the meeting. One of the resources that the participants have is to reach the absent participant by cellphone. We observed a recurrent pattern of action whereby one of the participants disengages from the video meeting to reach the missing person by phone. This negotiation process moves through four steps: 1) the detection of the problem, 2) the offer to call the missing person by one participant, 3) the acceptance of this offer by the moderator, and 4) the temporary absence of the participant from the video meeting to make the phone call. Our data concern videoconferencing in the context of international teachertraining in German as a foreign language (LEELU project, https://www.leelu.eu/english/).