Short videophone remarks between friends

In this article I focus on an interactional practice, the personal remark, in which a participant remarks on something related to the appearance, behaviour or environment of another. From a conversation analysis perspective, the organization of sequences initiated by personal remarks can be analysed to show how they can test the ties between participants and thus reveal some aspects of the relationship. Drawing on a corpus of videophone calls between friends, I show how the affordances of videophone communication drive the production of personal remarks. The case of personal remarks shows how a detailed, situated study of social ties in-the-making can be carried out.