Answering the Mobile Summons: Managing Multiple Communicative Activities Across Copresent and Mediated Modalities

• In Event: Using Affordances of Mobile Communication to Build Relationships and to Negotiate Social Actions

Abstract

The mobile phone has become embedded into our everyday lives, allowing us to be in almost constant contact with colleagues, acquaintances, and those with whom we are closest (Ling, 2012; Ling & Campbell, 2009). As a result of their ubiquity, mobile phone use may occur (and thus become interactionally salient) during already in-progress face-to-face activities. Though research has examined how mobile telephony is managed during face-to-face social interactions (e.g., Aaltonen, Arminen, & Raudaskoski, 2014; Humphreys, 2005), virtually no research has examined how participants orient to the audible chimes or vibrations that indicate the receipt of a text (or SMS) message from another mobile user, what we deem the mobile text summons. This paper focuses on the social practices through which interactants manage and respond to an incoming mobile text summons when they are simultaneously engaged in other co-present activities.

Authors

• Stephen DiDomenico, Rutgers U

• Joshua Raclaw, U of Wisconsin-Madison

• Jessica Sarah Robles, University of Washington