A question often arises about the degree to which people are influenced by the presence of a camera. This is, above all, an empirical question that cannot be decided in principle but must be investigated on each occasion of camera work. Frequently, the tape itself provides evidence that the camera mattered to participants. Such evidence might consist of visible monitoring of the camera or camera person, indications that participants avoid showing their face to the camera, changes in behavior indicating that people habituate to the camera as time passes, and the like. On a tape of toddlers in a nursery school, for example, 3-year olds initially come up to the camera, gesticulating and making faces, but five minutes later they play with hardly a glance in its direction. Linde (personal communication) found that policemen initially cleaned up their talk for the camera by substituting euphemisms for profanity but switched back to profanities and other familiar speech patterns as events heated up.

Experience shows that people habituate to the camera surprisingly quickly, especially if there is no operator behind it. Where people are intensely involved in what they are doing, the presence of a camera is likely to fade out of awareness quite rapidly. This is the case even in very intimate situations like the birth of a baby. Once people become absorbed in the work of getting the baby born, there is no time taken out to check on the camera, a fact that is visible on the tape itself. As a matter of fact, visual acknowledgment of the camera and interaction with the camera person can be taken as evidence that the high point of an event is over and people once more orient to the periphery.

For the participants themselves, different behaviors are on different levels of awareness. As a consequence, some are more readily modifiable if and when people take note of the camera. Gestures and body positioning are difficult to manipulate and control for any length of time, and micro-behaviors such as gaze and head turns are usually out-of-awareness. In talk, people make greater attempts to modify what they say than how they say it. One sometimes can discern a certain caution exercised by individuals when they are first on camera, but the mechanisms that orchestrate the sequential organization of talk, such as eye blinks or turn transitions, are probably visible whether the person is aware of the camera or not.

In the long run, and in particular as people become involved in tasks other than worrying about the camera, camera effects visibly wear off. As a practical matter we have found it most useful not to position ourselves behind the camera whenever possible. Then the camera, rather than being interactionally alive, quickly becomes the proverbial "piece of furniture" that nobody pays much attention to.

Other researchers report similar conclusions. One of the specific objectives of the Video Portfolio Project (Roschelle, Jordan, Greeno, Katzenberg, & Del Carlo, 1991) was to search for evidence of camera effects in classroom interactions. The investigators concluded that after the initial novelty wore off, little if any interference could be attributed to cameras. If anything, the equipment became a resource in this setting, not unlike other pieces of furniture. Similarly, Heath (1986) relates that a careful search of his extensive data corpus of patient-physician interaction produced very few instances of explicit orientation to the camera.

In summary, it might be reasonable to say that the kind and amount of camera interference is something researchers should attempt to assess for each particular project. It should neither be ignored nor considered fatal. Rather, every effort should be made to gauge its course and to control its effects which, judging from past experience, will be possible in most situations. In this, use of a video camera is in principle not different from other obtrusive methods of recording. No matter what the method, the analyst needs to take into account to what extent the process of data collection affected the event.