Video-mediated interaction imposes a fixed attentional frame: the interlocutor's visual field is cropped to a single face, eliminating the competing stimuli that physical co-presence necessarily admits. In the terminology of Erving Goffman's interaction ritual, the screen manufactures a guaranteed focused gathering—a monopoly of attention that unmediated proximity can never contractually promise.
For a cohort socialized entirely inside this frame, attention scarcity becomes the operative currency of intimacy: the cropped rectangle reads as devotion while a shared table reads as neglect. The irony is optical. Front-facing camera geometry places the lens above the displayed face, so participants who feel maximally seen are, in strict physical terms, never once looking at one another. Perceived intimacy becomes inversely coupled to actual gaze convergence—a Goodhart-style collapse in which the proxy for attention fully displaces the thing it was once meant to index.
Socio-Cognitive Commentary