Doing being an ordinary technology and social media user

Abstract

This paper uses discourse and conversation analysis of naturally-occuring conversations to describe how participants construct themselves as "ordinary" users of communication technologies-devices such as mobile phones, their communicative affordances, and the mediated interaction they enable (e.g., access to online communication via social media platforms). The three practices analyzed are (1) managing motivations by downplaying interest and stake in using technology and participating in online activities; (2) calibrating quantities of one's time and involvement using social media; (3) identifying investments in social media use through categories and identities that position users as appropriate or inappropriate. These techniques comprise an accounting practice that accomplishes identity construction in service of situated social actions to manage the moral implications of communication technology use.

Attending to the Mobile Text Summons: Managing Multiple Communicative Activities Across Physically Copresent and Technologically Mediated Interpersonal Interactions

“…To be sure, Beth orients to this availability as she asks for more information regarding the identity of the person who has just messaged Cam. This is especially noteworthy when considered against the broader backdrop of accountability (Buttny, 1993; Robles, DiDomenico, & Raclaw, 2018) and the interactional management of joint attention (Mondada, 2014) in interaction. While it is itself noteworthy that mobile phone use in the midst of copresent interaction is rarely made accountable throughout our broader collection of interactions involving mobile phones, 7 we found the practice of orally reporting text message content to be a further method for participants to deal with one’s mobile-related interactions while also display one’s accountability to maintain a certain degree of involvement and engrossment within the copresent encounter.…”

Some systematic aspects of self-initiated mobile device use in face-to-face encounters

“…This excerpt shows how the participants visibly and audibly negotiate the situated (un)acceptability and moral implications (see Robles et al 2018) of mobile device use in co-presence. Putting the phone to one's ear and initiating a phone call by dialling and greeting the person called are not initially treated as problematic by the copresent others: Hana and Jana continue to discuss the previous topic and maintain a mutual orientation, treating Pavla's phone call as an acceptable parallel engagement (although, as in the case of parallel conversations, there may be some possible perturbations in turn constructions, 020, 022, see Egbert 1993).…”

Interactional Adjustment: Three Approaches in Language and Social Psychology

“…Researchers examine talk-in-interaction in its rich linguistic and paralinguistic diversity, including non-lexical and non-vocal speech sounds (Keevallik & Ogden, 2020) as well as embodied features of communication such as gaze (Goodwin, 1979), body position (Schegloff, 1998) and more recently, touch (Matthew et al, 2020). Furthermore, researchers attend to aspects of the local ecologies of the interaction, such as engagement with phones and social media (Edmonds & Weatherall, 2019; Robles, et al, 2018) or involvement in complex tasks such as being instructed how to drive at high speed around a race track (Mondada, 2018a).…”