“I can’t talk now, I’m in a fitting room”: Formulating availability and location in mobile phone conversations

The aim of this paper is to begin to investigate the ways in which participants in mobile phone conversations orient to each other’s location, activities and availability. Through looking at data consisting of recorded mobile phone conversations, a conversation analytic approach is used to make initial observations regarding the character of mobile phone conversations. It is found that the frequent question “What are you doing?” sometimes worked as getting a location as part of the answer, which shows how location, activity and availability are strongly related. The participants thus got information about location, when this was considered relevant, through asking about activity. Location seemed especially relevant if it could give information about a future meeting. In some conversations where there seemed to be things going on where the called party was located, the caller attended to this by initiating the topic using a strategy giving the called a chance to end the conversation. [O]n each occasion in conversation on which a formulation of location is used, attention is exhibited to the particulars of the occasion. In selecting a ‘right’ formulation, attention is exhibited to ‘where-weknow-we-are’, to ‘who-we-know-we-are’, to ‘what-we-are-doing-atthis-point-in-conversation’. A ‘right’ formulation exhibits, in the very fact of its production, that it is some ‘this conversation, at this place, with these members, at this point in its course’ which has been analyzed to select that term; it exhibits, in the very fact of its production, that it is some particular ‘this situation’ which is producing it. Emanuel A. Schegloff, Notes on a conversational practice: formulating place, 1971 You can read the world out of a telephone conversation. Harvey Sacks, Lectures on Conversation, 1992/1995 Introduction At the time of Sacks and Schegloff’s investigations of the particulars and peculiarities of telephone conversations, a telephone was something fixed to a particular location. When calling someone you could have a fairly good idea of where that person was located, which meant you could draw some conclusions about the activities in which they might be engaged. Thirty years later, with the introduction of the mobile phone, you can call someone up and reach her or him in situations and locations you cannot predict even, as the title of this paper suggests, you can call someone in a fitting room. Because of the unpredictability of where the called is in mobile phone conversations, the assumption is that conversationalists often need to establish a mutual understanding of each other’s location, as well as their availability for having a conversation. The main issue of this paper is to begin to investigate the ways in which participants in a mobile phone conversation orient to each other’s location, activities and availability. This study will present the analysis of recordings of naturally occurring mobile phone conversations, looking at the issue of expressing location, or formulating place, in the words of Schegloff, over the mobile phone. While there is a widespread notion that mobile phone conversations are opened with “where are you”, is it really true that the first thing that conversationalists do in a conversation is establish location? And if this is so, how is this done? Somewhat surprisingly, in the mobile phone conversations considered in this paper, ‘what are you doing’ is the most frequent opening question. This paper will examine in detail this question, focusing on what can be accomplished with such a question. Also, it is discussed whether these initial observations on location work in mobile conversation can have anything to say about the ways in which the use of the mobile phone potentially transforms what it is to be in a place. The paper is outlined as follows. First, there is a presentation of Conversation Analysis and the analysis of fixed telephone conversations, along with an introduction of studies of mobile phone usage. Then follows the analysis, where I present and discuss fragments from the mobile phone recordings. The paper ends with a discussion on location work in mobile phone conversations as well as some ideas on how to continue this line of research. Related Work This paper is based on work which originates in two fields of research. The first is Conversation Analysis (CA), the study of naturally occurring conversation originating in the work of Sacks and his colleagues. In particular we will consider CA work relating to telephone calls. The second body of work is the growing number of studies of the use of mobile telephones. In this section, these two fields of research will be presented. Telephone Conversations and Conversation Analysis From the very beginning, conversation analysis has been closely linked to the analysis of telephone conversations. Sacks began his now famous Lectures on Conversation with looking at the openings in telephone calls to a suicide prevention center. One practical reason why telephone conversations were the focus for early research in conversation analysis was that telephone calls were particularly suitable for CA methods. By making audio recordings of both ends of phone conversations the researcher would get access to much of the same interactional resources as the participants, since they also are only connected through audio rather than using other interactional resources. Most important to this is that, on the phone, participants have no visual access to each other. The phone call has thus been in focus since the very beginning of the analysis of conversations. In particular in CA work there has been considerable attention given to the opening sequences of phone conversations. Schegloff’s PhD thesis, for example, consisted of analysis of the sequencing of conversational openings; its focus was the first five seconds of telephone conversations (Schegloff, 1967). In Schegloff’s paper Identification and Recognition in Phone Conversation Openings (1979), he deals with the issue of how participants identify and display recognition of each other. One important finding is that in his data, the answerer (A) often do not self-identify explicitly by name rather they rely on the caller (C) to recognize him or her by a ‘voice sample’. This can look something like this, as seen in an instance taken from Schegloff’s paper. (1979:35) A: Hello C: Hi A: Hi Schegloff argues that the first greeting (Hello) is an answer to the summons – the ringing of the telephone. The answerer’s second greeting then (Hi), is seen as a claim that the answerer has recognized the caller (1979:35). One important point to make is that conversation analysis originally looked primarily on North American data. This means that the rules identified were based on a somewhat limited and homogenous group of speakers. Especially in the case with identification and recognition, it is obvious to readers from other parts of the world that this pattern seems to differ from how Schegloff describes it. As the data collected for the present study was by Swedish conversationalists, studies of Swedish phone calls are of particular interest. In Lindström’s 1994 paper Identification and Recognition in Swedish Telephone Conversation Openings it is argued that Swedes seem to orient to the same issues as Americans in the opening section. However, the main difference is that self-identification by name is the most common way of answering the phone in her data (1994:238). As we saw above, this differs from what Schegloff claims about American phone calls. In the American phone calls the callers seldom self-identify, rather they rely on the other part to recognize them. Here is an opening sequence from Lindström’s Swedish data, where the answerer (A) offers a greeting and then self-identifies, the caller (C) also provides a greeting and self-identifies, and the answerer then provides a 1 There are of course other aspects to this interaction discussed in his paper, but for the purpose of the present study, this is the main argument. 2 With the exception of business calls where this can be different; the answerer often provides a name or company name. second greeting, which according to Lindström works as “claim that recognition has been achieved” (1994:238). A: Hej de e He:nri:k A: Hi ‘t’s Henrik C: Ja hej de va mormo:r? C: C: Yes hi ‘t was (maternal) grandmother A: ->Hej, A: Hi Lindström found that in the cases where the caller did not identify by name, the caller and the called had a close relationship, e.g. husband and wife or mother and child. Leaving out the explicit identification in the first turn by the caller, was thus a way of “doing being intimate”, Lindström argues. Another noteworthy thing is that Lindström finds that the question “How are you?” in the opening section is very rare in the Swedish data, whereas this is very common in American sequences (1994:238). Lindström also points out that Swedish phone identification sequences have a lot in common with the Dutch, which has been investigated by Houtkoop-Steenstra (1991). In both Dutch and Swedish, speakers overwhelmingly identify themselves by name. Opening up to the rest of the conversation Schegloff identifies nine ways in which the second turns in the phone call (the caller’s first turn) are constructed in his data. Of specific relevance for the present study is the second turn formulated as a “question or noticing concerning answerer’s state”. For instance, this can look like this: A: Hello C: Hi can you talk