Mobile performances of a teenager: A study of situated mobile phone activity in the living room

Convergence

Volumn 11, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 58-75

  Tutt, Dylan ^a  

^a LANCASTER UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 53349159096     PISSN: 13548565     EISSN: 17487382     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/135485650501100207     Document Type: Article

References (51)

1. The household panel was initially structured through (stereotypical) typologies, which could be deconstructed as the research progressed. The Turners were recruited as a 'nuclear family' household. In terms of geo-social detail, the home is a large farmhouse in a small, rural village in North West England. The house is 35 minutes away from the nearest town by car, and a full hour's bus ride to school for the children. Jean is a full time teacher, and Peter is a business manager. Once recruited, the six-household video ethnography was conducted over a yearlong period (November 2002 to November 2003). A small video recorder was positioned in the corner of the living room to film media interactions conducted through its spaces via technologies such as mobile phones, i/TV, PC/laptops and video game consoles. The video recorder was set to film three hour blocks of data, and was programmed in advance to cover daily routine and to target specific occasions (mealtimes, parties, holidays etc.)
2. Irene Cieraad, (1999), 'Introduction: Anthropology at Home,' in At Home: An Anthropology of Domestic Space, eds. Irene Cieraad (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1999), p. 10
3. International Telecommunication Union (ITU), 'Social and Human Considerations for a More Mobile World.' In proceedings of ITU/MIC Workshop on Shaping the Future Mobile Information Society, Seoul, 4-5 March 2004 pp. 12-13, http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/ni/futuremobile/SocialconsiderationsBP.pdf (accessed March 2004)
4. See Lillian B. Rubin, Just Friends: The role of friendship in our lives. (New York: Harper, 2004), p. 110
5. Dagny Stuedahl, 'Virklige fantasier: Kibermedia og Goa Kyberia,' in Netts@mfunn eds. K. Braa, P. Hetland, and G. Leistøl (Oslo, Tano: Aschehoug, 1999), pp. 219-232
6. Michael Hulme 'Me, my mobile and I,' Keynote Newsletter, Henley Management Centre, www.henleymc.dk/Newsletter/MeMyMobile.pdf (accessed Feb. 2004)
7. Rebecca E. Grinter and Mark Eldridge (2001), 'Y do tngrs luv 2 txt msg?' in Proceedings of the Seventh European Conference on Computer- Supported Cooperative Work ECSCW '01, Bonn, eds. W. Prinz, M. Jarke, Y. Rogers, K. Schmidt and V. Wulf (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), pp. 219-238
8. Richard Ling and Birgitte Yttri, 'Hyper-coordination via mobile phones in Norway' in Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance, eds. James E. Katz and Mark Aakhus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp.139-169. ITU, p. 22
9. Quoted in Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Basic Books, 2002), p. 5
10. Claus J Tully, 'Young people living in a mobile world: Theses on the cryptic socialization of mobility regarding the next generation,' paper presented at Alternative Mobility Futures Conference, Lancaster, 9-11 January 2004, pp. 1-15. http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/cemore/Word%20docs/Tully- young%20people. doc (accessed March 2004)
11. Crispin Thurlow, 'Generation Txt? Exposing the sociolinguistics of young people's text-messaging', Discourse Analysis Online, 1, no.3, 2003, http://www.shu.ac.uk/daol/articles/v1/n1/a3/thurlow2002003.html (accessed December 2003)
12. Rebecca E. Grinter and Leysia Palen, 'Instant Messaging in Teen Life,' Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Proceedings of the 2002 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, p. 5. New York: ACM Press, www.cs.colorado.edu/∼palen/Papers/grinter-palen-IM.pdf (accessed December 2003)
13. Grinter and Eldridge, 'Y do tngrs luv 2 txt msg?,' p. 227
14. Sonia Livingstone, Young People and New Media. (London: Sage, 2002), p. 172
15. Shelley Mallet, 'Understanding Home: A Critical Review of Literature,' The Sociological Review, 52, no.1 (2004), p. 78
16. Livingstone, Young People and New Media, p. 176
17. Such tactic negotiation of the 'homework comes first' rule include Ben (covertly) talking to his friends on the phone before using the internet for his homework and Jenny offering to set the VCR for her Dad provided that he 'hurries' Ben off the internet first
18. Roger Silverstone 'Beneath the Bottom Line: Households and ICTs in an Age of the Consumer,' PICT Research Policy Paper 17, (London: ESRC, 1991) p. 5
19. ITU, p. 7
20. Cieraad, pp. 10-11
21. David Morgan 'Everyday Life and Family Practices,' in Contemporary Culture and Everyday Life, eds. Elizabeth B. Silva and Tony Bennett (Durham: Sociology Press, 2004), p. 38
22. Cieraad, p. 10
23. Elizabeth B. Silva 'Materials and Morals: Families and Technologies in Everyday Life' in Contemporary Culture, p. 60
24. Janet Finch, Family Obligations and Social Change (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989)
25. Grinter and Palen, 'Instant Messaging in Teen Life,' p. 8
26. Mallett, 'Understanding Home,' p. 78
27. Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1974), p. 573
28. See Hochschild who tackles Goffman's disregard for inner feelings, to which situated actions might correspond. Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of human feeling (London: University of California Press, 1983), p.225
29. Virpi Oskamn and Jussi Turtiainen, 'Mobile Communication as a Social Stage: Meanings of Mobile Communication in Everyday life among teenagers in Finland.' New Media & Society, 6, no. 3 (2004), pp. 319-339
30. Ged M. Murtagh, '"Seeing the Rules": Preliminary Observations of Action, Interaction and Mobile Phone Use', in Wireless world: Social and interactional aspects of the mobile age, eds. B. Brown, N. Green and R. Harper (London: New York, Springer, 2002), pp. 81-91
31. Douglas Rushkoff, 'Erving Goffman', posted: Jun 14, 2004, www.thefeature.com/user/rushkoff (accessed Jun. 2004)
32. Erving Goffman, Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1971)
33. Nigel Gilbert, Researching Social Life (London: Sage, 2001), p. 15
34. Erving Goffman, 'Where the Action Is' in Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behaviour (New York: Pantheon Books, 1967), pp. 204-205
35. In Asylums (New York: Doubleday, Anchor Books, 1961), Goffman adopts a different, extreme reading of 'home'. He traces how 'contaminative exposure' operates in 'total institutions' through 'forced interpersonal contact' and the removal of 'private spaces to conceal ordinary private activities' (Goffman, Asylums, p. 28)
36. The electronic 'habitus' of virtual space demands different roles, or many different sides to the cyber self: when in front of the television, when talking on the telephone, when on the Internet, when at the cash machine. Most often, the cyberself cannot use visual gesture or gaze (except through emoticons, embedded images, video linkups, MUDs etc.)
37. Goffman, Relations in Public, p. 54
38. Roger Homan, The Ethics of Social Research (Essex: Longman, 1991)
39. Marcus Banks, 'Visual Research Methods,' Social Research Update, 11, 1995, http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/sru/SRU11/SRU11.html (accessed November 2003)
40. John Van Maanen, Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1988), p. 120
41. Erving Goffman, Gender Advertisements (New York: Harper Row, 1979), p.24
42. Goffman provides an excellent entry into studies of the minutiae of everyday interaction, which he terms the interaction order, and 'it is something of a puzzle why Goffman relies on purely verbal accounts of the interactions he so painstakingly documented' (Michael Emmison and Philip Smith, Researching the Visual: Images, Objects, Contexts and Interactions in Social and Cultural Inquiry (London: Sage, 2000), p. 6)
43. Tony Chapman, 'There's No Place Like Home,' Theory, Culture & Society 18, no.6 (2001), p. 139
44. Don McCrone, 'Getting by and Making Out in Kirkcaldy' in Social and Political Economy of the Household, eds. Michael Anderson, Frank Bechhofer, and Jonathan Gershuny (Oxford: Open University Press, 1994), p. 99
45. Erving Goffman, 'Where the Action Is,' p. 43
46. Konrad Lorenz's term quoted in Tom Burns, Erving Goffman (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 87
47. 'Overlays' are a type of byplay, which comprehends 'teasing, playful or provocative responses' (Burns, Erving Goffman, p. 87)
48. See Philip Graham, End Of Adolescence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 25-43, which charts the changing face of this adolescent stereotype
49. Tully, 'Young people living in a mobile world,' p. 14
50. José Machado Pais, 'Transitions and Youth Cultures: Forms and Performances', International Social Science Journal, 52, no. 164 (2000), p. 227
51. Examples of the public display of mobile phones might include the explicit 'advertising' of a new phone as a status symbol in bars, or inadvertently becoming the target for mobile phone theft in public spaces, through a disregard of the situated activity around one's mobile communications