Rarely have the very foundations of our daily communication been transformed as quickly as in March 2020. Due to the Coronavirus pandemic, large parts of our communication have moved to the digital realm. Most business meetings, university classes, and private conversations now take place on video call platforms like Zoom or Skype. This new environment has also brought about a whole set of novel communicative challenges. Yet, given the recency of these developments, there is not much academic research on how cultural differences in communicative behavior are manifested in the new video call communication. This pilot project attempts to fill this gap and provide a starting point for further research.

In this study, we investigate one particularly pervasive communicative challenge that probably occurs at least once in every video call meeting: your colleague or classmate starts talking, but they forgot to click the “un-mute” button, so you cannot hear anything. How do you react? For this pilot study, we are especially interested in cross-cultural differences in these reactions. Hence, we conducted experiments with 5 native Dutch students and 6 Chinese/Taiwanese students in order to observe how they tell us about the problem of not being able to hear us.

Research Question: What are cross-cultural differences between Dutch and Chinese/Taiwanese in repair initiation in video calls?