“I Can't Talk Now, I'm in a Fitting Room”: Formulating Availability and Location in Mobile-Phone Conversations

Abstract

In this paper I investigate the ways in which participants in mobile-phone conversations orient to each other's location, activities, and availability. By looking at data from recorded mobile-phone conversations, I use a conversation analytic approach to make initial observations on the character of mobile-phone conversations. I found that the frequent question “what are you doing?” sometimes caused a location to be given as part of the answer which shows how location, activity, and availability are strongly related. The participants thus obtained information about location, when this was considered relevant, through asking about activity. Location seemed especially relevant if it provided information about a future meeting. In some of the conversations where it seemed there was something going on where the ‘called party’ was located, the ‘caller’ reacted by initiating the conversation with a strategy which gave the called party a chance to end the conversation.

Communicative affordances and participation frameworks in mediated interaction

“…The advent of mobile telephony brought to the fore technological elements such as caller pre-identification, along with social factors such as the personalisation of phone handsets and the de-anchoring of the phone and its user from singular physical locations (Weilenmann, 2003). This has encouraged further changes in the structures of communication, especially in terms of opening exchanges and the organisation of topic initiation.…”

Transports of delight? What the experience of receiving (mobile) phone calls can tell us about design

“…Emphasis was placed on the openings and endings of each call, an emphasis seen in work on telephone calls from [17] to [2]. However, the reason for this emphasis was not to look at how participants orientate towards each other [1], but rather to look at how one participant orientates towards the phone and the fact of the incoming call.…”

Ethnomethodology/Ethnomethodological Geography

“…Equally there are a number of 'wild geographies' which are of interest to human geographers and ethnomethodologists. The vernacular geographical knowledges emergent in endless varieties such as, what neighbours know about their neighbourhood (Laurier, Whyte, & Buckner, 2002), how tourists find their way around cities Mondada, forthcoming), how browsers search for books in libraries (Carlin, 2003;Crabtree, Nichols, O'Brien, Rouncefield, & Twidale, 2000) and how people formulate their location during mobile phone calls (Laurier, 2001;Weilenmann, 2003).…”