Mobile phone call openings: tailoring answers to personalized summonses

Abstract

A B S T R A C T Conversation analytical (CA) methodology was used to specify the new opening practices in Finnish mobile call openings, which differ systematically from Finnish landline call openings. Since the responses to a mobile call orient to the summons identifying the caller, answers have changed and diversified. A known caller is greeted. The self-identification opening that was canonical in Finnish landline calls is mainly used for answering unknown callers, while channel-opener openings involve orientation to ongoing mutual business between the speakers. Some of these changes reflect real-time coordination of the social action that the mobility of mobile phones enables. In all, the adoption of new ways of answering a call shows that people orient themselves to affordances that new technologies allow them. Mobile phone communication opens a salient new area both for the analysis of talk-ininteraction itself and also for understanding communicative behaviour in the era of ubiquitous information technology. K E Y W O R D S : affordances, call opening, conversation analysis, mobile phone calls, recipient-design, telephone calls In this article, we introduce a new pattern for initiating conversation on a mobile phone. Mobile phone talk is an ideal object for conversation analytical (CA) methodology as all other dimensions of communication except voice are naturally excluded. Indeed, much CA work has been based on (landline) telephone calls. The findings on the openings of landline telephone

International Perspectives on ELT Classroom Interaction

“…Such studies include Houtkoop-Steenstra (1991) for Dutch, Hopper and Chen (1996) for Taiwanese, Lindström (1994) for Swedish, Park (2002) for Japanese and Korean, Sifianou (1989) for Greek, Sun (1998) for Chinese, andTaleghani-Nikazm (2002) for Persian. There appear to be some changes to this pattern with mobile phones, where the called may recognise the caller from information on the screen, so they regularly miss out the answer to the summons and go straight to a greeting (Arminen and Leinonen 2006;Hutchby and Barnett 2005).…”

Communicative affordances and participation frameworks in mediated interaction

“…Because the mobile phone tends to be the personal possession of a given individual, and because these devices tend to incorporate caller display by default, it is more likely that both caller and called parties can treat one another as to all intents preidentified at the start of a call and so dispense with many of the identification and recognition sequences that evolved around the landline phone (Schegloff, 1986), a technology that tends to exist in shared use among multiparty households. Different analysts have taken different positions on the question of how thoroughgoing or radical these changes appear to be (see Arminen, 2005;Arminen and Leinonen, 2006;Hutchby, 2005;Hutchby and Barnett, 2005). The contribution by Ayass adds a new dimension to these considerations of the interactional uses of mobile technologies (and crucially, not just electronic devices but more traditional technologies of language mediation such as books and newspapers), analysing the ways they can be used not only as enablers of involvement in interaction but also as involvement shields; technologies whose affordances allow distinctive ways of managing what Goffman (1963) called the territories of the self in public space.…”

To Call or to Recall? That's the Research Question

“…Understanding how often each party-caller and callee-can be the source of such important information is key to simplifying automatic approaches for mobile phone call annotation. To investigate this, we leveraged concepts from Conversation Analysis, a research area that has recently focused on studying communication in mobile phone calls [Arminen and Leinonen 2006;Hutchby and Barnett 2005;Laurier 2001;Weilenmann 2003] beside its frequent studies on landline phone calls [Schegloff 2002;Whalen et al 1988;Lee 2009]. We used the concept of turn [Sacks et al 1974] when analyzing our dataset to investigate whether callers annotate information shared by the callee more often than they annotate information shared by themselves.…”