Performance: Paralinguistic Cues, Metadata, and Identity

In terms of performance, two other narratives in this group also stand out because of their violation of the conventions for webcam use. Whereas Lanning's, Musgrave's, and Dauterman's narratives contain notable moments of performance in which the speakers adopt more animated manners of speech to connect with their audiences, the overall performances of Anonymous and Johnston demonstrate the opposite tendency. Unlike the other five narrators who follow the webcam convention of orienting themselves to the camera to engage the audience, Anonymous' and Johnston's narratives develop a strong sense of distance through the authors’ avoidance of eye contact with the viewer. The clips from Johnston's and Anonymous' narratives included here have been muted to draw attention to their paralinguistic elements.

Johnston faces the camera but does not maintain eye contact with it, frequently looking above, below, and to the side, refusing viewers the intimacy of eye contact. This interaction with the camera stands out in the context of this subset of narratives. Dauterman’s gaze, for example, darts between the webcam and the computer screen, meaning that she usually looks at the audience (if not quite directly) and that her moments of broken eye contact are mostly associated with pauses in her speech. Johnston, in contrast, repeatedly looks away from the audience completely, even when speaking, denying viewers the intimacy of focusing her gaze on them or inviting them to maintain eye contact with her.

Anonymous' positioning relative to the camera and audience is even more distant, given that it violates the "talking head" convention of webcam videos that all the other narrators follow. Anonymous turns away from the camera so the audience can only see her profile, making it almost seem as if she is not speaking to the viewing audience at all. Furthermore, unlike all the other narrators who apparently devote their whole attention to narrating their computer memories, Anonymous' narrative is interrupted by a dog that jumps up onto the couch and into her lap, distracting her and the viewer from the story she tells. Unlike the other videos that privilege the narrative by constructing a quiet, distraction-free visual and activity frame for it, Anonymous’ everyday life intrudes on her narrative in the form of the dog, which contrasts with the tendency the other narratives demonstrate to portray the narrators strictly in terms of the technologically literacy identity they construct in their stories.