“Surprisingly, Nobody Tried to Caution Her”: Perceptions of Intentionality and the Role of Social Responsibility in the Public Use of Mobile Phones

Public Cellphone Use Does Not Activate Negative Responses in Others…Unless They Hate Cellphones

“…Instead, it appears that cellphones are a benign distraction. By applying the ostracism paradigm to this new context, we gain additional insight into why so many of us persist in doing something that people generally agree is inappropriate (Cumiskey, ; Ranie & Zickuhr, ), and are faced with new questions that can and should be answered in order to better understand the role of mobile phones in public spaces.…”

“…Indeed, public phone use is associated with fewer conversations between strangers (Campbell & Kwak, ), it reduces helping and smiling at strangers (Banjo, Hu, & Sundar, 2008), and 80% of people believe that cellphone use in social contexts hurts social interaction to some degree (Ranie & Zickuhr, ). In fact, even those that engage in public phone use often criticize others who do the same (Cumiskey, ). Many scholars have probed the nuances of how and why people use phones in public spaces (Campbell, ; Cumiskey & Ling, 2015; Humphreys, ; Ito, 2005; Ling, 2002), but, to our knowledge, the effects of this absence presence on individual psychological states have not been experimentally tested.…”

“…Most of us have been subject to and perpetrator of ostracism in the form of public texting or other public cellphone use. Ever‐changing norms of cellphone use, and variation in norms across cultural and demographic groups (see Baron & Segerstad, 2010; Campbell, ; Ito, 2005) further complicates navigation of the “potentially volatile” social spaces created by public cell phone use (Cumiskey, ).…”

“…Computer‐mediated communication theory on the richness and intimacy of digital communication (e.g. Valkenburg & Peter, ; Walther, ), coupled with findings of negative attitudes towards public cell phone use (Cumiskey, ; Ranie & Zickuhr, ), suggests that cellphone exclusion may indeed activate the negative effects of ostracism. At the same time, mobile research points to the integration of cellphones into every aspect of private and social life (Gergen, ; Ling, ).…”

An exploratory comparative analysis of the use of metaphors in writing on the Internet and mobile phones

“…For example, this is the context in which critics have employed the BIOLOGICAL metaphor of an ECOSYSTEM as a way of making sense of the manifold industry-related conflicts affecting mobile marketing Sinclair 2008, 2009). Recourse to the DRAMATURGICAL metaphor of the theatre stagefamously first developed by Erving Goffman (1990)can be understood in similar terms: as an attempt to make sense of the many nuances and ambiguities attending mobile users' negotiations of public-private tensions (see Cumiskey 2005;Fortunati 2005a;Julsrud 2005).…”