(American native speaker) I do this interjection thing* all the time in both technical and social conversations. I still find this desirable over Zoom/Teams cal

(American native speaker) I do this interjection thing* all the time in both technical and social conversations. I still find this desirable over Zoom/Teams calls, even with video on, because for me the purpose isn't so much checking that the digital connection is still live as it is checking that communication and understanding are occurring. It annoys me to no end that the latency and anti-feedback mechanisms in the software swallow these little sounds or mess up their timing or make the primary speaker think they're being interrupted. I've reluctantly had to stop this practice at work as a remote worker. *For what it's worth, the article claims there is no English word for this, but I was taught to call it "backchanneling" in a linguistics course.