This paper examines how participants in face-to-face conversation employ mobile phones as a resource for social action. We focus on what we call mobile-supported sharing activities, in which participants use a mobile phone to share text or images with others by voicing text aloud from their mobile or providing others with visual access to the device’s display screen. Drawing from naturalistic video recordings, we focus on how mobile-supported sharing activities invite assessments by providing access to an object that is not locally accessible to the participants. Such practices make relevant co-participants’ assessment of these objects and allow for different forms of co-participation across sequence types. We additionally examine how the organization of assessments during these sharing activities displays sensitivity to preference structure. The analysis illustrates the relevance of embodiment, local objects, and new communicative technologies to the production of action in co-present interaction. Data are in American English.
This article presents a qualitative investigation of communication practices interactants use to manage mobile phone activity while they are engaged in a copresent conversation. Drawing from conversation analysis and a collection of naturalistic video recordings, our study of mobile phone use in situ focuses on how participants orient to the mobile text summons, the audible chimes or vibrations that indicate the receipt of a text message (or short message service [SMS]). In these moments, interactants must simultaneously manage attending to their phone and the copresent conversation. Our analysis shows how people may use nonverbal and verbal techniques to attend to their mobile phone based on their identity respective to the copresent activity. The study contributes to scholarly understandings of technology use, multitasking, and the management of attention in interpersonal communication.
This article combines uncertainty reduction theory and politeness theory to deduce hypotheses about how relational uncertainty may predict appraisals of face threat. Participants were 273 individuals who (a) reported on relational uncertainty; (b) simulated leaving a voice mail message for their dating partner to address the assigned goal of catching up, sharing information, giving comfort, or receiving comfort; and (c) evaluated the face threats of their message. As expected, relational uncertainty was positively associated with appraisals of face threat, and it was negatively associated with the extremity of appraisals of face threat, even after judges’ ratings of face management strategies were covaried. The article closes by discussing the implications for understanding relational uncertainty, politeness, and appraisals of face threat.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.