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In this contribution we analyse how mobile device users in face-to-face communication jointly negotiate the boundaries and action spaces between digital and non-digital, shared and individual, public and private. Instead of conceptualising digital and face-to-face, i. e., non-digital, communication as separate, more recent research emphasises that social practices relying on mobile devices increasingly connect physical and virtual communicative spaces. Using multimodal conversation analysis, we investigate the situated use of mobile devices and media in social interaction. Excerpts from videotaped everyday conversations illustrate how participants frame their smartphone use in the presence of others, such as when looking at digital pictures, or when recording voice messages. A detailed analysis of verbal and embodied conduct shows how participants negotiate and interpret the connection or separation of digital and non-digital activities and possible forms of participation within these. (Digital) publicness or privacy are therefore to be understood as an interactive accomplishment.
The ubiquity of smartphones has been recognised within conversation analysis as having an impact on conversational structures and on the participants’ interactional involvement. However, most of the previous studies have relied exclusively on video recordings of overall encounters and have not systematically considered what is taking place on the device. Due to the personal nature of smartphones and their small displays, onscreen activities are of limited visibility and are thus potentially opaque for both the co-present participants (“participant opacity”) and the researchers (“analytical opacity”). While opacity can be an inherent feature of smartphones in general, analytical opacity might not be desirable for research purposes. This chapter discusses how a recording set-up consisting of static cameras, wearable cameras and dynamic screen captures allowed us to address the analytical opacity of mobile devices. Excerpts from multi-source video data of everyday encounters will illustrate how the combination of multiple perspectives can increase the visibility of interactional phenomena, reveal new analytical objects and improve analytical granularity. More specifically, these examples will emphasise the analytical advantages and challenges of a combined recording set-up with regard to smartphone use as multiactivity, the role of the affordances of the mobile device, and the prototypicality and “naturalness” of the recorded practices.
In this chapter, we will investigate smartphone-based showing sequences in everyday social encounters, that is, moments in which a personal mobile device is used for presenting (audio-)visual content to co-present participants. Despite a growing interest in object-centred sequences and mundane technology use, detailed accounts of the sequential, multimodal, and material dimensions of showing sequences are lacking. Based on video data of social interactions in different languages and on the framework of multimodal interaction analysis, this chapter will explore the link between mobile device use and social practices. We will analyse how smartphone showers and their recipients coordinate the manipulation of a technological object with multiple courses of action, and reflect upon the fundamental complexity of this by-now routine joint activity.
Within a rapidly digitalising society, it is important to understand how the learning and teaching of digital skills play out in situ, particularly amongst older adults who acquire these skills later in life. This paper focuses on participants engaged in the process of learning digital skills in adult education courses. Using video recordings from adult education centres in Finland and Germany, we explore how students mobilise their teachers’ assistance when encountering problems with their smartphones, laptops or tablets. Prior research on social interaction has shown that assistance can be recruited through a variety of verbal and embodied formats. In this specific educational setting, participants can use complaints about their digital skills or mobile devices to obtain assistance. Utilising multimodal conversation analysis, we describe two basic sequence types involving students’ complaints, discuss their cross-linguistic characteristics, and reflect on their connection to this educational setting and digital devices.