Licoppe, C. (2026). “Personal noticings in video calls and doing being friends”, Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 264, October, 17-33.
In this article, I focus on an interactional practice, personal noticings’, in which a participant comments on something related to another’s appearance, behavior, or environment. From the perspective of conversation analysis, I discuss the organization of these sequences and show how they put into play relational issues between participants. I then show that the affordances of video-mediated communication facilitate the production of personal noticings and analyze various examples of personal noticings made during video-mediated conversations between friends, as well as the relational work accomplished during these sequences. The case of personal noticings in video-mediated conversations illustrates how it is possible to precisely study the dynamics between interpersonal relationships and mediated forms of sociability at the level of the interactional practices themselves.