My young daughter (10) decided to video chat with her friend during an online-game session recently.

They were playing Roblox, less a game than a multiverse of user-generated game worlds built on a malleable platform. AdoptMe, one of the more popular Roblox worlds, allows players from around the globe to interact in a virtual town where some can be kids, some adults, and they interact as spontaneous families. They can hatch and raise virtual pets, too.

What struck me was the way my daughter and her friend engaged in video. My daughter’s phone, camera on, was lying flat on the arm of the sofa beside her. Its camera had a view only of the ceiling. They were talking to each other often through its audio, but not constantly, as their characters interacted in the game itself. 

As someone who had entered the world of digital video chat sometime in my mid-twenties, my instinct was to correct this. Video chat, to my generation, means putting your face in the picture, keeping eye contact with the camera, and being ‘present’ for the duration.

I decided not to follow my instinct, and just observed. Neither child was bothering to look at their cameras or watch their phones. They were connected through audio but not monitoring each other visually.

It was a digital version of how my friends and I used to play with LEGO - fittingly, the inspiration for the entire look and feel of the Roblox universe - when I was my daughter’s age. Yes, my friend and I would be in the same room, but we weren’t watching each other. We were doing our own thing, chatting, sharing what we were building, in a connected world.

I realised that to the digital native, the first generation in history to have key moments of life broadcast into the digital space - first words, first steps, first day of school are all there for my daughter to review on her phone whenever she wants - this video connection is exactly the same as being in the room together. Why bother to put their faces on-screen when the peripheral presence and the conversation is all they need?

I began to notice the same behaviour in video chats with her grandmother. As Granny’s eyebrows, forehead and occasionally thumb dominated the screen, my daughter would chat to her, but not bother to look at her phone. What had, at first, seemed like disinterest or rudeness to me was the opposite: my daughter was in her comfortable space, Granny was there, they could talk, and there was no need to present to camera, or indeed watch the stream.

It was repeated when Granny was helping my daughter with her homework. The phone was propped on the bed frame so that her grandmother could watch the homework being done, but my daughter didn’t look at its screen, and often worked without talking. They would swap a few words, Granny would offer suggestions or feedback, but it was more about presence than formal engagement.

What had, at first, seemed like an odd, distant behaviour from my daughter suddenly made so much sense.

This is a generation who has truly embraced video chat as an extension of their world, not an intrusion into it. They use their video as their eyes and ears: intuitively, naturally, aware of the connection but focused on what they’re doing.

This digital connection, these relaxed and totally uncontrived conversations in the digital space, go some way to explaining the rise of audio-only platforms like Clubhouse, too. Connected real-time in a digital world, but at the same time living in our own realities. It is no longer either-or, it is both at once.

It was the kind of epiphany I’d had some years before at my daughter’s Kindergarten Showcase. I had looked at the sea of parents, every one of them holding up a device capturing the kids’ discordant singing to be later inflicted on other eyes and ears. I had initially felt sad that these children were confronted with a phalanx of technology and not their parents’ approving faces. But then it had dawned on me - the phones and tablets were the approving faces. 

For a digital native, whose most important events had always happened under the eye of a smartphone, the devices confirmed the significance of the moment.

Years later, in fact, the words “why weren’t you recording it?” came from my own daughter’s mouth after completing some significant school task. My excuse - that I wanted to be there in the moment with her - was met with an uncomprehending look. “Being there in the moment,” to her, meant having the camera to capture it.

I’m sure a lot of observation and research has been done on all of this. My own thoughts on it are rough, raw and uninformed. But to me it’s a beautiful thing. The children of the online world are making it truly theirs, owning it rather than being owned by it. And I would not change a thing.

Ironically, Granny was more comfortable with her non-screen-facing granddaughter than I. “She’s just being a kid,” Mum had said. Absolutely true.