Constructing a Specific Culture

Constructing a Specific Culture:

Young People’s Use of the Mobile Phone as a Social Performance Letizia Caronia and André H. Caron

Abstract: This paper presents the main results of an exploratory qualitative study on the functions and meanings of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in young people’s everyday life. Specifically, this study concerns teenagers’ cultural ways of interpreting the mobile phone and its uses, as they become part of their social world. Through their accounts and narratives about ’young people’s use of the mobile phone’, teenagers construct their specific cultural model of this communication technology: it is seen as a radically social performance. Insofar as it is conceived as such, the mobile phone (MP) becomes a detonator of social thinking: it provokes reflective thinking on the ethics, etiquette and aesthetics of everyday action and social life. Reflecting upon the forms of use of the mobile phone, teenagers also explore the identity-making processes involved in the presentation of oneself on a public scene. In other words, they interpret and make the uses of the MP work as a social grammar through which people are supposed to define themselves and those around them. In this sense, using an MP in a teenage-appropriate way is not a matter of technical competence; it requires larger communicative skills that are cultural knowledge of when, where, why and, moreover, how to use this technology. Interpreted in the frames of teenagers’ specific culture, the uses of the MP are also a tool for constructing the main dimensions of this culture and are used as a laboratory for the development of the skills needed to become competent members of their own community.

According

Introduction: ccording to a phenomenological theoretical approach to cutture culture communication and everyday life, people are viewed as constantly engaged in technologies constructing the meaningful dimensions of the world they live in. Through and everyday their situated and object-mediated actions, through their ways of construction of speaking about and referring to those actions, contexts, objects and culture characters that inhabit their social world, individuals constitute the cultural forms of livina their social lives.1 Accordina to this approach,

Downloaded from con.sagepub.com by andre h caron on May 3, 2016

29

everyday life may then be conceived as a never-ending cultural work through which individuals constantly produce the meanings, structures and social organisation of the world they live in, as well as the social identities of themselves and of the people they interact with or talk about. The social world where this work of everyday culture construction is performed is not constituted only by people who interact reciprocally. As renewed attention to the material aspect of social life indicates,2 the artifactual dimension of daily life is a crucial component that affects and is affected by interactions, social organisations and cultural frames of reference. Things, whether technological or not, are more than an inert background for people’s everyday lives. Insofar as people establish meaningful interactions with objects and artefacts, they make them exist in their social world, making sense of and involving them in a mutual co-construction process3 Literature on the social uses of media and the cultural ways of coping with a technological environment has shown how these uses, like other social practises, may be considered as semiotic actions in the strict sense of the term. That is, actions in which performance is both a way of communicating and a tool for constructing meanings and social realities.

The available

technologies, the

material features of the

objects which they integrated in, are all tools for the everyday production of culture and identities. Through media related practises, individuals construct themselves in specific ways and produce the forms of their social participation.4 Simply put, through our uses of media, through the way we act out these uses, we define (at least locally) ’our belongings and our identities,5 support them, the daily

routines

create

or are

We define but we are also defined. Insofar as face-to-face interaction and talk may still be considered as the basic forms of socialisation,6 the ways in which media uses become candidate topics of everyday conversation are powerful tools to construct their meanings and the identities of those who use them. People’s ways of using media, whatever

real

imagined, enter into everyday conversations as parts of the through which people constantly construct who they are and who are the people they talk about.77 The progressive never-ending introduction of new technologies into people’s everyday life, the multiplication of available new courses of or

narratives

action and ways of

communicating and getting information

hypothetically expand the range of the tools through which people construct everyday culture and identities. Faced with this changing and growing technological environment,$it then becomes relevant to investigate how the work of every day culture construction may be affected by the new forms of technologically mediated actions, and how it

affects them.

Among the information and communication technologies (ICT) now available, the mobile phone may be seen as a good analyser of the process of co-transformation that involves people (their everyday life, -culture and

identities),

information and communication


technologies.The

30

mobile phone adds two absolutely new dimensions to one of the oldest and deeply studied forms of communication, the telephone call:9 The delocation of communication .

The embodiment of the

object The notion of delocation enlightens the space-free, locus-independent nature of this kind of telephone call. With this object-centred category we want to enlighten the material side of the action-centred category of ’mobility’: ’delocated’ refers to the technical and material dimensions that constitute the conditions of possibility for mobile or nomadic .

communication.’° The notion of embodiment refers to the process of integrating the object with the user’s own body, making it work as a part of one’s physical self. For at least these two technical transformations of the telephone call, the mobile phone may be seen as a good tool for analysing the way in which the communicative functions and the material aspects of a CT are both involved in making its use become a social

practice. A certain amount of research has

already been reported in recent years the diffusion of this technology.&dquo; Most of the research on the reasons for adopting the technology and the main characteristics of its diffusion shows that young people and adolescents progressively incorporate it. It seems quite evident that - even though important differences exist across different countries’2 - young people are a major and already well-established target for the adoption of this technology. 13 It is not surprising then, that research has focused on young people’s uses of the mobile phone, especially in those European countries where the adoption rate among adolescents and young people had been quite on

high. 14 This first generation of studies allowed us to better appreciate the beginning of what may be considered as a social phenomenon per se: the progressive, capillary, increasing diffusion and appropriation of this CT by adolescents and young people. These studies, each of which have their own perspective, investigated the different aspects of what may be seen as the same process: the domestication and integration of the mobile phone into youth-specific culture. The

reasons

for

adoption, 15 linguistic forms and social functions of

communication enabled by the technology, the frequency, contexts, and goals of its use, all these macro aspects of the diffusion, uses, forms and

functions of the mobile

phone

may be considered

as

already well

explored. Less explored 16 are the cultural and social micro-aspects involved in young people’s uses of and discourses on the mobile phone. We need to have a better, more detailed knowledge of young people’s cultural understanding of the ITC, of the ways in which they integrate these artefacts in their culture and - conversely - transform them. What are the social and cultural dimensions at stake, besides (or should we say, through) the uses and the macro-functions (i.e. informational versus relational, call making vs. SMS sending) of this kind of Downloaded from con.sagepub.com by andre h caron on May 3, 2016

31

communication? What kinds of meanings, cultural

forms, social identities and structures are created through the everyday use of this technology of communication? How and to what extent do the material characteristics of this object produce or modify the repertoires of possible social actions? How are the object-related actions used as symbolic resources for everyday culture construction? What kind of social practises do they create and how are they integrated into the ones already existing?

study presented here is the second part of a larger 3-tier research project&dquo; designed primarily to investigate these micro-dimensions and to explore to what extent the uses of mobile phones among adolescents and young people may be considered as a social practise. Rather than the characteristics of uses (who, when, where, for what purposes, to whom), we were interested in the process of culturalisation of these technological artefacts by adolescents. For this purpose, our study was primarily interested in reconstructing the repertoire of MP roles, meanings and functions from the young people’s point of view. For that purpose we adopted some innovative qualitative research procedures aimed at articulating discourse about technologies and the underlying competencies involved in the production of these discourses. Particularly this paper focuses on five strongly related recurrent patterns of adolescents’ discourse on mobile phone uses and users: The stage dimension as the core of young people’s cultural model of

The

~

MP .

~

~

~

use

The ethical reasoning upon the consequences of its The construction of an MP specific etiquette

uses

The aesthetical

thinking about the MP as an embodied part of the Self The identity-making process concerning the social competence and social identity of the user

The culturcal A primary way to investigate the cultural and social meanings of the meanings of mobile phone uses is to look at how people talk about them. Language MPs : the is in fact a meaning making system and discourse is one of the most ethnographic powerful sense making activities. It is mainly through talk that people approach to define and negotiate the definitions of the world around them, discourse transforming it into a cultural and social world. Basically, it is mainly analysis through discourse and every-day talk-in-interaction that people construct the constitutive dimensions of their culture. as well as in cognitive development strongly underlines the relevance of studying social interaction and talk to understand not only people’s ideas about social phenomena but moreover how this cognition is socially constructed. More than a set of shared ideas, ’social cognition is the process by which people apprehend one another’s meaning in the course of communication’.’8 Insofar as knowledge is both a cognitive and social phenomenon,19 ’the proper focus of study is on the knowledge and processes of social relations as made manifest in actual social interaction’. 20

Literature in social cognition


32

discourse as a way for entering into people’s culture draws the assumption that talk is both a way to construct and a tool to upon this culture, to move from and toward shared forms of life, to express publicly display and continuously update intersubjective understanding The analysis of discourse is then a way to reconstruct this common world of shared meanings and to draw on accounts of culture and social organisation of the people involved. 22 Moreover, insofar as this common world of meanings is publicly produced, it ’becomes available as a resource for social scientific analysis’.23

Analysing

The relevance of language in constructing and sharing a cultural understanding of the world we live in is the theoretical framework

underlying

our

methodological design: investigating young people’s through the analysis of their talk about

crucial dimensions of MP uses, this technology. But there is

more than one way to conceive discourse analysis. Focusing the ways individuals construct their world, the ethnomethodological and phenomenological traditions in sociology and anthropology strongly advocate taking the actor’s perspective in analysing his/her own practises and discourses. Following these theoretical perspectives, we adopted an ethnographic approach to discourse analysis.24 What makes the specificity of an ethnographic approach to discourse analysis are not the methods used (interviews, naturally occurring conversations, situated speech events, etc.) but the analytical perspective on the collected talk. The very aim of this approach is to figure out and work with emic categories: that is the ones people use to account for their practises and to reconstruct the topics of the discourse at hand. on

In and through their talk people are supposed to construct and negotiate the meanings of what they are talking about, they are supposed to create and recreate the very sense of their practises and of those of other people. The researcher is supposed to align his interpretative and analytical perspectives with those exhibited by the members of the community he studies, adopting, or at least figuring out, their proper and specific frames of relevance and categories.25 The analytical work consists in enlightening the sense making activity, the meanings and the repertoire of interpretative resources of the speakers. Adopting both a referential and a pragmatic perspective, discourse is not analysed as a mere vehicle of content or information, it is rather seen as a performative tool to create sense and meanings.26

The research To

explore the relevance of MPs in young people’s ’economy of methodology: meanings’,27 we used an innovative version of the focus groups the technique: peer conversational focus groups. This methodological tool conversational was designed to gather discourses on the uses and the users of mobile focus groups phones and pagers and to provide us with an appraisal of the meanings, functions, and

senses that were at stake from the actor’s point of view these practises. The main characteristic of the conversational focus groups consists in their progressive shifting to a ’conversation among peer’ format:


on

33

its management is less structured than in traditional group interviews. Participants’ talk-in-interaction takes more the format of a focused discussion among peers in terms of agreement-disagreement dynamics, joint construction of reasoning, co-story telling, and a certain degree of overlapping of turns of talk.

although a topic is clearly pre-established,

The thematic relevance of their turns of talk is guaranteed by the shared definition of the speech event and by the use of a grid for the group discussion. As we know, one of the main epistemological and methodological concerns regarding the adoption of a thematic grid for interviews (even open-ended ones) is the adoption (or at least the proposal) of the researcher’s frames of relevance. The researcher selects and establishes what counts as a relevant topic to discuss or what are the main aspects of a phenomenon that is worthy of analysis. After the ’interpretative turn’ in the social sciences28 and its epistemological concern about the dialogic nature of interviews, the social organisation and joint constructed nature of the gathered talk, 29 this is a dimension that can no longer be underestimated or concealed.3°

Adopting this epistemological perspective on the nature of interview talk and wishing to grasp what were the meaningful dimensions of teenagers’ points of view on the MP in their own lives, we designed three specific methodological strategies: The construction of the interview grid by the informants themselves ~

~

~

The attribution of the ’interviewer role&dquo; to

one

The presence in each group of individuals with respect to ownership of an MP

member of the group

having different statuses

The first strategy

was supposed to work at a meta-research level: the grid itself becomes a strong index of what were the crucial aspects of MPs in teenagers’ lives from the teenagers’ points of view. discursive data collected through this methodological device have a

interview

The

different epistemic nature with respect to more traditional ways of designing focus groups: they may be seen as joint discussions, co-constructed reasoning or reflexive thinking on the topics that are relevant from the informants’ point of view. From this perspective, it is not the researcher who asks informants questions about the ’who, what, when, how and where’ of the use of a technology. It is the technology itself that brings people to question themselves on these issues. The second methodological strategy we adopted concerns the interviewer’s role. Although the interview grid and the main general questions the interviewer was supposed to ask were constructed by the informants themselves, the role of the interviewer as a ’topic relevance maker’ cannot be underestimated. In one focus group (for comparative purposes) a member of the research team played this role. However, in the other groups the interviews were conducted by one of the young group members. This strategy was conceived to gather discourses from participants’ different forms of social organisation and from different


34

ways of

playing the interviewer’s ’building up role’ with respect to the ongoing multi-party conversation. In the first case we have longer discussions and a deeper exploration of selected points (the researcher playing the interviewer role in accordance with the typical format of the focus groups). In the second case the interviewer goes in and out of his or her role: trying to make participants follow the interview grid and participating in a substantive way in the ongoing discussion. In these cases, the discussion took the form of a collective peer discussion on the selected general topic and subtopics.

The differences among the participants with respect to the ownership of an MP is another important methodological device: it allowed us to get discourses from different positions with respect to the individuall experiences of the use of a mobile phone or pager.31 This methodological device was designed also for introducing a specific social participation structure inside the groups. The different standpoints were supposed to work as a social engineering process to generate collective reasoning structured by the dynamics of agreement and disagreement. Over and above gathering expressions of individual

gather an ongoing jointly produced reasoning they lead to. The study was carried out during the summer of 2002 in the context of a University sponsored project of which the goal was to raise the awareness of young teenagers towards higher education programmes. Under these circumstances, we met 38 young French-speaking Canadians, from various ethnic backgrounds, aged 14 to 18 (15 boys and 23 girls) for whom we proposed a series of activities. The opinions,

enhanced

we

may

by the different points of view and negotiations

participants were invited

to

define

a

research question pertaining to their

technologies, decide which methodological instruments to use (small group interview) and then carry out the data gathering. This project was carried out over two days, with the teenagers divided in 12 small focus groups (3-4 per group) thus enabling them to go in depth into the topics. The groups were randomly organised according to sex, age and ownership of mobile phones and pagers. In each of them there interest in

were a

new

combination of teenagers who had either owned

one

for

a

relatively long time, who were new users, who did not wish to own one or young people who were considering buying one. Each group chose their own interviewer based on the fact that some expressed interest or had form of past experience in such a role. Therefore no formal was done but guidance was provided beforehand. The teenagers themselves, except for a control interview group carried out by a researcher, directed the group interviews. The collective discussions lasted on average 45 minutes, were video and audio taped by the teenagers and transcribed verbatim by the research team. some

training

We

and

analysed the verbatim transcriptions looking at the semantic level propositional meaning of the talk. And also we looked at the

pragmatic level and social meanings related to the social organisation of the talk-in-interaction, and to the ways of speaking adopted by

participants.32 Downloaded from con.sagepub.com by andre h caron on May 3, 2016

35

Special analytical attention has been paid to the narratives produced by during the joint discussions. As is the case for story-telling in naturally occurring conversations,33 the stories produced during interviews are theory building, model-constructing activities through which people communicate and construct their points of view

the participants

and stances toward the topic at hand.34 Participants in the focus groups construct theories, demonstrate them, reinforce, deny and provide counter arguments to other people’s positions or reasoning through the narratives they chose to tell (from a repertoire of possible ones), through the way they construct stories from first-hand experience or reported events and through the way they animate characters and transform real or fictitious anecdotes in typical

examples. In this next section we will report and analyse some extracts of the verbatim transcriptions that are prototypical examples of each recurrent pattern of discourse we think important to focus on.

Narratives at The first discursive pattern we want to look at refers to what we call the work: the stage dimension of the (perceived) uses of the mobile phone.

stage dimension of When committed in talking about MP in young people’s every day life, in young accounting for its uses and abuses, adolescents typically inscribe the MP

people’s and the related forms of talk in what Goffman called a ’social cultural model encounter’.35 Whether appropriate or not and whether submitted to a of the MP social judgement or not, the prototypical use of the MP is conceived as social insofar as it is situated in a larger scene inhabited by not only the caller and the called (the official recipient of the talk) but also by other characters: bystanders36 playing all possible roles of unofficial hearers. Eavesdroppers or overhearers, more or less ’polite bystanders’, the unofficial participants people the scene making the use of an MP a social performance or a play on a stage. 37 For analytical purposes we focus our analysis on a specific conversational genre: the narratives occurred during the recorded conversations (see above). Indeed, ’stories are the principal places where members of a society use language to encode and shape complex events central to the organisation of their culture’.38 some representative examples of the stories we collected insofar as they illustrate the prototypical nature of the ’stage dimension of MP uses’ and the relevance of this folk model of MPs. We will focus here only on the location of the stories told.

that Let

Example no

1

are

us

examine

~milie: R6mi-Loup:

I’ve got one, can I tell it? Of course, go ahead.

Cameraman:

Of

~milie:

Of course, the cameraman said yes, if someone’s mad, it will be his fault

course.

...

(Laughs)


36

Example

no

~milie:

Ok, often in when I take the bus, often in the bus, there are people who talk on the phone, but really loud so everybody hears them and all of a sudden the mobile phone starts ringing. So finally, they were pretending to talk, they’re really.... And then, they take the phone and: ’Hello?’ (Laughs). They were pretending to talk so everyone could see them. And when the phone starts ringing they’re really embarrassed.

R6mi-Loup:

This is

~milie: [interview no 4]

It

...

2 R6mi-Loup:

stupid ... happened to you?

never

This is

stupid ... happened to you?

tmilie:

It

Remi-Loup :

Oh no.I have an anecdote, it happened to her I remember. There was a lady, its mostly an anecdote, but its mostly horrible, there was a lady ok, she was about to give birth ok, she had contractions ok, and there was this guy with a mobile phone that my mom had just seen before so she said: ’hey, there’s this man there, he has a mobile phone. Quick, I’ll go see him and everything’. She gets to the guy and then she figured out that he was talking with a toy phone. It was a toy, it was not a real mobile phone, it was a toy. (Laughs) And he was there: ’Yeah,I buy it from you 100 million’ as if he was doing business, and it was a toy ... This has no point!

tmilie: Remi-Loup : [Interview no 4]

I would feel bad.

never

Yeah, for the

guy....

Anyhow,I thought

it

was

stupid.

Perhaps not surprisingly, in our corpus we find local variations of some myths that surround the MP and its uses,39 particularly those referring to inappropriate uses, such as displaying the phone or simulating one (see example nos 1 and 2). Using this repertoire of stories (whether first hand, pretended first hand or reported and often cross-culturally shared), young people contribute to the cultural creation and circulation of the mythologies that, as with all myths, produce the sense and crucial dimensions of what they are about. Before and besides the specific plot,4° these stories situate the use of the mobile phone in a public setting: the user is depicted as (pretending) talking in a bus where ’everybody hears’ him (example no 1) or showing the ownership of a MP in an unspecified public place where other people may see him and act according to the public exposure of the MP (example no 2). of the

While using this shared repertoire of stories, engaging in what may be considered a polyphonic repetition,41 and typically adopting some reality effect devices (’I often take the bus and’, ’Doesn’t it ever happen to you?’, ’my mum had just seen before~’), young people actively contribute to the construction of the cultural model of the MP use as a ’stage performance’. They also participate in the cultural work of constructing the mobile phone functions that these shared stories are supposed to illustrate. A similar function is accomplished through telling


37

personal everyday narratives whatever they explicitly concern ad hoc constructed typical case or stories constructed as ’real’ ones. Let us look at another example taken from our corpus.

Example no

3 tmilie:

What do you think about people who talk their pager starts ringing in a public place? Louis-Carl: That rings in a public place?

on

their mobile phone

or

that

R6mi-Loup:

It depends ... In the subway heul (Laughs) Everyone has that, in the subway, its ’Dring, Hello?’ Ok.

tmilie:

It doesn’t

Louis-Carl :

It’s true, it does not work. No, the bus, the bus. But in the

Rémi-Loup:

come

through

in the

subway, by the way

...

subway, it works in the

stations.

tmilie: R6mi-Loup:

In the stations yes, but not in the subway. When you’re in the tunnel, it doesn’t work anymore, but when you’re in the station, when the train begins leaving it works.

tmilie:

It

Remi-Loup:

Yeah,

Louis-Carl:

I don’t mind that it rings in public places, it’s even because everyone checks if it’s not theirs.

R6mi-Loup:

(Laughs) Yeah, that’s it... They’re like idiots! ’Damn, damn, where is it?’

fmilie:

They all look at the same time. And finally, they figure out that it’s not theirs, but anyway ... (Laughs and murmurs)

brand of the mobile

it has to be powerful or you antenna just over it, but it works.

R6mi-Loup:

[Interview

depends on the

no

phone...

need

to

have

a

reception

funny

4]

The extract concerns a ’constructed-as-realstory’ and it is a good example of the conversational devices that are used to produce it as such. First of all, it shows the joint constructed nature of the stories occurring in a multi party conversation (even when introduced by an official first speaker). The first speaker (who is both a member of the community and the interviewer) introduces the use of MPs in public places as the next official topic of the conversation, the co-participants jointly construct the story of a mobile phone ringing on the subway/bus. What is worth noticing is the mistake made by the second speaker (first teller), an error quickly repaired by the first speaker (the only one who actually has an MP): the MP simply doesn’t work in the subway. This ’repair’42 produces a (re)formulation of the story setting: the subway becomes the bus. However, this critical change of location risks invalidating the credibility of the first teller and so the argumentative force of the whole story. Trying to demonstrate that in some specific circumstances, some specific MPs may work in the subway, the co-narrators legitimate the first location of the story and in so doing they engage in protecting the credibility of the initial teller. Why?


38

We may argue that what counts from the participants’ point of view is not the ’truth value’ of the story, which they suddenly detect as a clear invention, an ad hoc created story. What counts most is its argumentative function: this story (as almost all the narratives occurring in everyday conversation and in interviews) is told to demonstrate a - at least local theory, to argue in favour of some thesis. We may even go further and argue that the fictional nature of such a narrative, the fact that it is completely invented, far from delegitimising the tellers’ point of view, is an index of the co-narrators’ strong commitment to their local theory: the pragmatic goal of such a story is not’telling the truth’ but affirming a thesis on young people uses of mobile phones. In a more or less articulate way, all the narratives we collected identified the MP and its use on a stage. Even the ’counter story’, the only one

collected referring to a solitary use of the MP, indirectly identified it with a larger social scene. Let us see how this counter story is presented.

Example no 4

Chnstme:

[interview

When my mom, because she leaves often. She walks around and then we don’t know where she is and we have no way to reach her, she has no mobile phone or nothing. So that’s it, if she had one, it would be better, but my sister has one andI think it’s mostly useless because of what she does, it’s like, she calls, she’s like in the bus, she has nothing to do, so she calls us to fool around, to kill time so that’s it, it really has no point. (...) and some other times, like at night, because, we don’t really have permission to talk on the phone at night, but she goes in her room. She talks with her friends at one in the morning, and we can’t sleep. But it’s like she uses it stupidly. On weekends I think it’s free or something like that. So instead of using the home phone, she uses her mobile phone because she says ’I won’t be busying other people’s line, because I use mine’. no

6]

The counter story refers to a solitary bedroom use of the MP by the speaker’s sister. This narrative occurs just after another one where the teller has given a story typically showing an onstage use of the MP (her sister using her MP on the bus). This sequential position is meaningful. The general topic of the turn is still the use in public places: without losing cohesiveness the teller presents the ’solitary use’ as a subtopic generated by the previous one. Where is the relevance link? The lonely use of the MP is depicted as a ’private meeting place’43 located inside the family, in the household where the main character (the owner and user of the MP) tries to act as if she were alone but in fact she is not: family members are there, depicted as playing the role of unaddressed recipients or unofficial participants. we mentioned above, the interview grid for the discussion clearly previewed ’uses in public places’ as one of the candidate topics selected by the adolescents involved in the study.44 This topic may then be considered relevant from a teenager’s point of view on at least two levels. On the first level, the topic was selected as a crucial one by the

As


39

teenagers involved in was confirmed by the

participants

making the interview grid and then its relevance extent to which it was explored and discussed by and lead to the conversational work of telling stories.45

The extracts we have analysed are representative of the whole corpus of stories: all of them show variations of the same basic scenario. Besides their specific plot and their belonging to shared mythologies or to personal experience, all the stories occurring during the recorded conversations locate actual or possible ways to use this communication technology in a public scene inhabited by at least three characters: the caller, the called and a (more or less) specified audience. of such a model of MPs in young people’s discourse does that young people do not use mobile phones in situations where no other people are around. It does not mean either that they use the mobile telephone more often in public places, or that the mobile telephone is specially designed to be used in public places. The data we collected with other methodological instruments shows that young people use it as well in public as in private places like bedrooms.46

The

recurrence

not

mean

However, for an ethnographically oriented discourse analysis, an absent topic like ’the solitary use of the MP’ doesn’t necessarily refer to a world be seen as a meaningful official absence leading to inferences about the speakers’ points of view on the topic at hand. The absence of any discursive reference to solitary uses of the mobile phone doesn’t inform us about the real uses: it gives insight into the phenomenological stance of our informant’s vis-i~-vis this artefact in their life. In other words, we do not find here representations of the actual uses of MP; we rather find the cultural (or folk) model4$ of MP use. out there. 47 It has to

Young people’s model of the MP use as a stage performance makes it relevant to analyse in greater depth the social consequences of such cultural ways to define this communication technology, its ownership and its uses. In the following sections of the paper we will explore some of the consequences deriving from the cultural representation of the MP as a social performance. in The main consequence of the stage dimension of the mobile phone use social is that it becomes a detonator of social reasoning. It is exactly because reasoning: MP use is conceived as typically occurring in a public setting that it discourse on triggers reflection on the social consequences and forms of its mobile phones performance, as well as on the ’face’ of the performer. Insofar as a more as social or less specified ’other’ is on the scene when a personal behaviour is competence occurring and that this ’other’ is supposed to act as a bystander ’able to constructing glean some information on ’who’ (whether in categorical or biographical devices terms)’49 is using the MP, the personal behaviour is no longer an individual affair: it becomes a social one.

Engaging

On the basis of the discursive data we gathered, we found four main dimensions of the social thinking produced by our informants while accounting for MP uses among young people: · An ethical dimension: MP use is depicted as affecting the ’other’ in the setting.


40 .

~

.

An etiquette dimension: MP forms of politeness.

use

needs to

comply with

some

shared

An aesthetic dimension: insofar an MP is perceived as an embodied visible object, it leads to reflecting upon the ways its material features integrate with body forms and appearance.

identity-making dimension: as part of the body and visible behaviour, the MP and its use trigger an inference-making process on the social competence and the social identity of the performer.

An

While drawing on sociological theoretical tradition and empirical studies of such concerns as practical ethics,5° aesthetical reasoning and etiquette

issues, 51 everyday politeness phenomena,52

our perspective is radically Following a grounded theory approach,53 we identified these categories as they emerged from a first level analysis of our field material. They then became our theoretical framework to account for an

empirical

one.

adolescents’ discourse on MP and related social practises. To explore the issues above we will take into account some of the narratives we collected. This time the focus will be more on the plot of the stories, that is to say on the actions and behaviours of the characters that animate the stories and the recalled events. Narratives are indeed a strong discursive strategy not only to construct and share cultural models of reality (i.e. of communication technologies uses), they also ’provide participants with arenas for interpreting events’.54 In constructing the narratives, tellers and co-tellers use a multiplicity of voices to animate characters55 and through inner dialogism56 they give their evaluation of the actions, behaviours and people related. As we will

by telling stories young people evaluate some MP uses, users’ behaviours and the related consequences. Constructing the character of the ’owner’, depicting their behaviour in some ways, introducing other people’s point of view, they evaluate the former through the eyes of the latter. In Bakhtinian terms, they engage in a theory building activity ventriloquating through their characters’ voices. see,

Developing

an

of the other: the ethical dimension in awareness

Far from being a deregulated, a laissez-faire behaviour, the use of MPs among young people seems to work as an arena for the exploration and construction of ethical thinking. It appears to be a form of thought

concerned with the basic categories that inform the moral aspect of social life: ’what is wrong’, ’what is right’ and why. When talking about young MP uses, young people constantly define and redefine such categories, people’s reflect upon the conditions of their application, and engage in some accounts of MP basic forms of moral judgement. Our intent here is not to compile a typology of ’appropriate and inappropriate uses’ 17 from adolescents’ points of view. Instead, we will focus the analysis on the process that lies behind the local definition of

inappropriate behaviours. What is considered appropriate or not, in what circumstances and why may differ according to individual experience. What should be noted is appropriate

not

vs.

what is considered

’right’

or

’wrong’ but the

very


production

of such

41

joint reasoning on the social destiny of personal action. When they reflect on the use of MP in public places, adolescents match the user’s and the other’s perspectives, and construct their judgements from this intersubjective point of view.

o

We will present here some examples insofar as they are representative of the ethical reasoning produced by young people while talking about MP uses

Example no

and

users.

5 Vanessa :

I think it’s

good for emergencies and for work...

But the that it’s expensive and that it disturbs people around you also. Let’s say you’re doing something that people don’t want to be disturbed by the ring. Even if mobile phones ... The person has to leave and it will disturb everyone. So, you think it’s disturbing for other people, it’s a lack of respect?

problem

is

...

Nicolas: Vanessa:

[Interview

Yes. no

2]

In this part of the conversation, Vanessa produces a hypothetical/ story whose characters are: an impersonal ’you’ (or an unspecified ’people,’) who is making something, an ’it’ referring to an MP ringing, the user and their behaviour. Taking an evaluative perspective, the teller depicts the behaviour of the ’user leaving the scene’ as the appropriate one. Constructing a narrative representation of ’how things have to go’, she offers to the audience (and to the analyst) a normative model of reality: the ring of an MP is interpreted as a ’disturbance’ which, in turn, is jointly interpreted as a ’lack of respect’.

Through this

telling, the teller and her audience are jointly interpreting according to an ethical frame that brings them to theorise and to produce a more general statement: ’disturbing other people is a lack of respect’. In and through their talking about MPs, the two adolescents accomplish a social reasoning insofar as they explore ethical categories and engage in some basic forms of moral judgement. Let us analyse two other examples. micro story

some

Example no 6

MP

uses

Hadrian:

And

Momca:

say ’Haa’ and speak very loudly... What do you think about that? I think it’s a little show off, yeah. They can go out or lower the volume It bothers me. It bothers me that someone

people who talk on the

begins speaking

mobile

phone in public places, and

like that. If it’s in the

bus, he

cannot

get off the bus, but he can at least cover his voice. Or talk faster and say ’Oh, I’ll call you later’, but not continue. Asama:

Hadnan:

That’s it, call later maybe. And if you had a mobile phone, would you


speak

m

the bus...

42

Momca:

I don’t thinkI would do that

Asama:

It’s the

Hadrian:

...

same

...

thing.

how would you react if someone disturb me’?

came

up to you and said:

’speak less loudly, you Monica:

Well,I call back later.

Val6rie:

Me,

don’t Hadrian:

a mobile phone, I talk ... as we say, like, speak louder. That’s something thatI like people doing.

as soon

I will

try

asI have

not to

you be shy to speak when you’re m a public place people heanng your conversation?

And, would with other

No, it depends what type of conversation, the people you’re with, if you’re talking to friends you don’t mind, but if it’s more

Asama:

mtimate ...

witnessed, about how young

Hadrian:

Do you have anecdotes that you people use the mobile phone?

Monica:

Sometimes, it happens that you talk to all of

someone, and

rings, he starts talking, and talking and talking, you say: ’Hello, I’m here’ and the other person keeps on talking. This,I don’t like.

[Interview

no

a

sudden it

5]

Here again the conversation concerns some MP related practises (i.e. ’speaking aloud’) that are categorised as disturbing. Reflecting upon real or hypothetical cases, adolescents are making a Gedanken Experiment: they try to imagine themselves and their way of acting in similar circumstances. These hypothetical behaviours appear to be ethically informed: ’call back later’, ’not continue’, ’trying to not speak louder’ are jointly constructed as models of action that are supposed to reflect actor’s sensitivity to other people’s perspective.

This part of the conversation ends with another hypothetical story concerning another typical event: the by-stander position taken by a partner in a face-to-face encounter when the other partner answers his MP’s summon. The teller constructs the characters in ways that allow her to make a judgement on the depicted behaviour. Taking the perspective of the person left in a by-stander position, she evaluates ’answering an MP’s during a face-to-face encounter’ as ethically questionable behaviour.

Although in a processual way, the teller here is interpreting the event and applying the category of social of~ence58. Besides the specific behaviour at stake here, what is worth noting is that the teller is producing a sociologica) reasoning informed by an ethical concern. Downloaded from con.sagepub.com by andre h caron on May 3, 2016

43

Exarliple no 7

Hadrian:

And in your school, doss or in school?

are

you allowed to have

a

mobile

phone in

Not in dass, but in school yeah. are not allowed in class or in the school.

Monica:

Asama :

We

Val6rie:

It’s the

Hadrian:

The

Val6rie:

Well, her ...

Hadrian:

So,

Asama :

It’s like in school you don’t walk and you talk, that’s But there are some!

Monica:

Val6rie:

same

same

not in

for

thing

me.

as

Asama?

class, but you’re allowed

in

school? sure

...

Monica:

If we get inside the school, we have to turn it off. Yes, you have to turn it off during class.

Asama:

It’s forbidden. But

Hadrian:

What do you think about those rules? Do you think they should be allowed to that they should be able to talk in class ...?

some

don’t do it

...

...

Asama:

I think it’s ok ... It’s like; you’re in class. If everyone had mobile phone in class the teacher would speak and everyone would be on the phone.

a

Monica:

Yeah that’s it.

Asama:

You know it’s like ’How

(laughs)

you?’ you know. may prevent him from concentrating. are

Monica:

It

Asama:

You lose time.

Monica:

Maybe also if it was something urgent, but you but I don’t think yeah ...

Asama:

Never!

Monica:

...

but I don’t think that

at

never

know,

that age you will have like ...

Asama:

say that a vibrating pager, a pager that vibrates, like with no sound, no disturbing, nothing. That way you look and during recess you go. Otherwise you tell the teacher’I‘m going to the bathroom’ and you go call. Because if you say ‘It’s urgent, I’m going to call’ and that you go call, it will surely be confiscated because you don’t have the right to use it in class.

Hadrian:

So, for you, the solution would be

I would

even

a

pager

more

than

a

mobile

phone? Yes.

Asama :

[Interview

no

5]

prototypical use of MP in public places is located, it becomes relevant to reflect upon its social consequences. In this extract, participants engage in talking about one of the main spheres of reference for adolescents: the school world and its set of norms. In this world the use of MPs is regulated, and participants reflect on the ’rightness’ of such a regulation. Once the

Introducing

a

counter-factual narrative, Asama


explores the

44

consequences of

(Monica) do the

the existing rules and makes the audience the teacher will lose his concentration and

breaking

same:

students their time. The rule is then

jointly accounted for as a good one. new hypothetical case: what may happen

The story telling goes on with a if it was something urgent? Here another perspective arises, the one of a caller that needs urgently to reach the person called. In this vein, participants reflect on the ethical consequences of ignoring a call that may be about a serious matter. The narrative interpretation and evaluation of the unfolded actors and events brings the teller to construct some solutions to the dilemma. These solutions (the vibration mode of summons, call back during recess, lying to the teacher and claiming to need to go to the bathroom) are sensitive to both the rights of the caller, the need to not disturb other people, and respect for the general norm already stated and accepted: turning the MP off when in school.

producing their accounts and typically locating MP use on a stage, young people and adolescents engage in a reflection upon the social consequences of individual action, the necessity of matching individual and collective reasons for action (being available vs. not disturbing). In In

word, accounting for the

of MPs, adolescents the basic issues of ethical thinking. uses

explore and

a

go

through Even though they do it in a very local and applied way, they nevertheless explore issues such as respect for other people (i.e. by lowering the volume of their voice or hesitating before giving priority to the MP summons) and the need for rules in social life (i.e. school or classroom norms). But they also consider the possibility of transgression and related sanctions (i.e. turning the MP on when use is forbidden, and asking to go to the bathroom to overcome a prohibition and avoid sanctions). Thus through their talk about MPs, adolescents elaborate some forms of MP related behaviour constructed by taking an intersubjective perspective and by adopting an ethical stance vis-a-vis the topic at hand. Discourse on MP use may then be seen as a theory-building activity, a way in and through which young people construct and improve the awareness of others, which is a constitutive part of developing a social competence.59 Shared forms In a very consistent way, the ethical dimension of adolescents’ accounts and good overlap with reflection on the polite forms of MP use. When a new the technology enters into people’s everyday lives, it poses a politeness etiquette problem insofar as its use needs to be socially regulated in shared and dimension of accountable ways, both at the micro-level of everyday interactions and at MP use in the macro-level of institutional settings. Mobile phone use (like email young use)6° is no exception: in the absence of an established and shared code, people’s daily uses of mobile phones are often local laboratories for rules of accounts etiquette. This work-in-progress process of establishing rules, ways and forms for mobile phone use is echoed by the cultural market: ’good manners’ pamphlets and sections in magazines reinforce and contribute to the social definition of what counts as a polite form of MP use. Far from demanding context-free, unlimited use, young people and adolescents participate in the social construction of mobile phone use as manners:


45

rule-governed behaviour by developing specific politeness rules. This is precisely because the MP is conceived as a social object, a communication technology used ’under the gaze of others’, and thereby poses a politeness issue. The reflection on appropriate forms of talk, the local construction of MP ’good manners’, is made through the adoption of the audience’s perspective but also by speakers ventriloquating other

a

Indeed, there are at least two ’others’ on the scene whose perspective have to be taken into account when discussing if and how to

voices.

public places: the caller and the called. Let us see some examples showing the accomplishment of such etiquette construction by adopting a multiplicity of voices. use

the MP in

Example no 8 ~milie: R6mi-Loup:

Somebody really wants to reach you ... Yeah, Yeah, who really wants to reach me anyway,I mean ...

~milie:

Would it bother you

to

...

SoI will

answer

be disturbed at this time, that’s the

question? It depends. That depends where. That always disturbs me, butI will answer, just by courtesy,I will answer, I will not keep the person waiting.

Remi-Loup:

If I

Louis-Carl :

am

a restaurant, the movies, in the bathroom, I will not but at any other time tnolill answer. It’s a question of

at

answer,

politeness. ~milie:

And euh

would you like people to invade your private life by calling often, a place where they can always reach you? If there is a place where I don’t wanna be disturbed, I can always turn the mobile phone off. So if I turn off the phone, the

Elissa:

...

person won’t be able to reach

~milie:

But sometimes,

we

by itself and then

me.

forget. Sometimes, I turn it off, but it opens people call me and I feel embarrassed.

some

(Intermew no 4] The public scene where the hypothetical ring occurs also affects the more or less witting hearers. The breach of its expected flow may also affect the called, producing that most social emotion: embarrassment. However, turning the cell phone off or not answering it, might not be the solution: this behaviour affects caller expectations. Answering or not answering is then a politeness question insofar as it affects at least three parties and their respective needs, wishes, rights and obligations: the caller, the called and the audience. Rules must exist or have to be constructed to find how to negotiate these three often conflicting

perspectives. reflection on rules for social action has pointed out,61 of etiquette are ways of typifying behaviour in public places insofar as it becomes expected, accountable, unsurprising and legitimated. Teenagers’ politeness judgements do not concern the use of the MP as such, but the aspect and forms of its performance. They thus actively participate in the process of social construction of etiquette rules

As

sociological

norms

~~~

__


46

for mobile

culture,

a

phone

use,

if it is from the

even

standpoint of their specific

perspective that might be different from that of adults. Let

us

analyse one final extract in this section that shows adolescents’ strong commitment to developing etiquette reasoning.

Example no 9

Moussa:

Simon?

Simon:

What doI think about

Moussa:

Yes.

Simon:

They are good people (laughs). No, but

Omar:

need it fihat’s great I mean ... But it also depends ... Some have

people who

have some?

one

I

mean..

If they really

only for (to have) style.

(...) Does mobile

Moussa:

phone change something about the status of the

person who has one?

For sure, if she’s talking she’s talking on her mobile phone all day long Some do it but ... They don’t stop talking, we can’t talk anymore to this person, she’s not accessible any more, but if we use it in a regular way, there’s no problem. That’s OK. (...) In terms of You have been talking about style in the last few minutes, what would you mean by style? Be modern. (laugh) But some have a mobile phone only to impress, to show how they are cool, just like smoking, I think it’s disgusting, but for some ’ha I’m cool, my god I have a cigarette, a mobile phone’. That’s the same thing. ’I feel older,I have a mobile phone, a pager, look everybody,

Virginie:

...

...

Moussa:

...

Simon:

Virginie :

it goes here’. you know, maybe he has a mobile phone that’s up-to-date than mine, he will say ’ha yark, yours is ugly’,

Also, for some,

Omar:

more

’ha look at mine, it’s prettier and it’s smaller’. Or to catch one’s attention, really so when your phone is ringing you set the tone at the loudest level and you let it ring, and then everybody looks at you and they know that you have a mobile phone.

only to say Simon:

So you all agree that

Moussa:

people will

notice the person more, it

attracts attention ...

Omar, Virginie, Simon:

Yes

the person

Moussa:

Secondly,

Virginia:

No,

Moussa:

She tries

Simon:

It depends on the context, that really depends on the context, you have some instances when you know Yes, at work you don’t have the choice to have a mobile phone.

not

is

more

to

more

important?

important.

show

to

others she is. ...

Virginie: _


47

Simon:

It has to

Moussa:

Do

do, that’s it, with work.

people who

have

a

mobile

phone or a

pager feel

more

important? Some yes, it gives them style, they speak louder to be noticed and Yes as a style

Virginie:

...

...

Yes and

they give their number to a lot of people and they think that everyone turns around them and it’s sure he will always want

Simon:

...

fact,

Moussa:

In

Simon:

That’s it, that’s

Virginia:

Yes, exactly.

[interview

no

it creates

an

egocentric

environment.

really it.

1]]

The onstage crucial dimension of adolescents’ folk model of the MP leads them to reflect upon how it is used and, moreover, how it ought to be used. We chose this extract of one multi-party discussion because it is representative of the main dimensions of MP use that are subjected to the participants’ judgement and because it is an example of ongoing joint construction of an etiquette for MP use. Indeed in this piece of conversation participants jointly elaborate a judgement on the forms of its use. Depicting characters using it in some ways (i.e. the ’owner’ who overexposes his MP), giving them voices (i.e. ’I feel older,I have a mobile phone, look everybody’) and intentions (’if they really need’ vs. ’some have one only for style’), tellers construct the narrative platform for making a social judgement (’it’s ok’ vs. ’I think it’s disgusting’).

previous analysed examples, the very topic of judgement is the of object exposure, of speaker’s tone of voice, of the number of telephone rings and loudness, of the exhibition of oneself as

As in

excesses: excess

’an MP user’. These

ridiculous, impolite

all forms of performance sanctioned otherwise inappropriate.

are or

as

it is context dependent and negotiable, somewhere there is that makes the difference: the use of the MP is a social performance and as such it has forms and ways of being acted out. No matter which MP-related behaviours are considered right or wrong, this technology seems to lead teenagers to reflect on social etiquette and to practise situational ethics. 62 Here again, what is worthwhile noting is not which behaviours are locally considered polite or not. The phenomenon we are exploring is the process of reasoning about and etiquette and the fact that it is a constitutive part of the technological culture of ado~escents.

Even

though

a measure


48

Exploring the

The reasoning about the MP as a social performance and the shared aesthetic negative judgements of excessive exhibition lead the discussion to the dimension of aesthetic dimension of the appearance and forms of being in a public the social self: scene. When adolescents engage in talking about MPs, when they the MF’ as an account for its actual or possible uses, a recurrent pattern emerges: this embodied object is conceived as an embodied one. Besides its technically available object communication functions, its purely physical features, forms, size, colours and ways of being carried trigger a reflection on one’s own appearance and on one’s own body as the visible part of the self. In other words, MP material features work as ’texts of being’,63 ways of constructing and mirroring one’s own identity,64 ’voices of the body’ .65

analyse here some extracts to determine the relevance of the ’embodiedness’ in teenagers’ cultural model of MPs and their uses.

We will

Example no

10 Anne:

So, if you don’t want a negative

image

as a

mobile

phone

user

you have to hide it?

No, but there’s

Isabelle:

a fine line. You know you wear a shirt, a real short one, you have your mobile phone hooked on, it’s visible: everything’s fine. But the one who is exaggerating It‘s like anything else.

Anne:

It

...

[Interview

Example no

11I

no

can

be visible but you can’t show it, is that it?

3] You don’t carry it only for the look ... For those who it’s clearly ’I carry one because it looks good’. You’re just like no way.

Isabelle:

...

Of course if you need one, you can use it a lot and make it look good. It doesn’t matter. But some people have one only for the look, that’s disgusting.

Julie:

[interview ’If you

no

3]

short tee-shirt and the mobile may be fine, it may be fine’, ’you

wear a

phone

is

attached,

make it fine’: this everything technological object is represented as a visible part of one’s own body which has its own features, form, colour and size that may or may not be consistently integrated with one’s own body. Of course there may be (and they actually are) significant differences with respect to how the MP is perceived as an embodied object. The two extracts above are indeed the only ones in our corpus that refer to a harmonic incorporation of the MP as a part of the physical and visible Self. can

All the other references we collected are constructed upon an image of MP as a non-integrated prosthesis of the body. 66 Let us see some

examples. Example no

1 Z tmilie:

R6mi-Loup:

The mobile phone in itself. Does the design an influence on the purchase?

the brand have

yes. The design. For example, a mobile phone with rounded forms and someone who likes rounded forms will not buy a mobile phone completely cubic you know... A little square ’Oh!I have a little square of plastic in my pocket!’

Yes,

...

_

or


49

~mhie:

lt’s like

Louis-Carl:

brand,I don’t think so The brand, in fact the brand goes with the design, you will buy a brand, you will buy the phone for the design, you will probably not see this design in another brand, so you will buy

anything else fin~lly~

For the

R6mi-Loup,

...

the brand at the

same

time than the

design.

[Interview no 4]

Example no 13

Anne:

Like you Isabelle, your brother has and all that ...

Isabelle:

It doesn’t make

me

phone booth

something

or

want to have ...

one

one.

and he

can

reach you

(...)You’re looking for a life, I

It’s not necessary in my

would not want any, I would not want to carry one it’s always too big, it doesn’t fit in a pocket You have to You know, you attach it here and you’re afraid of have a skirt or you’re dressed up and you’ve got ’oops’! The phone is coming out, what’s that? It’s almost a toy, you have to carry it that’s unpleasant some times you know: ’ha it’s annoying, it’s always ...

...

...

falling

or comes

off’.

necessarily useful to have a mobile phone ... When you have a backpack to put it m or pants with pockets or leans with ... But when you go out, you’re leaving, Friday night you go dancing and you have a skirt and a little shirt, you know ’where do I put it?’ (...) (...) So it’s OK you’re safe but I wouldn’t like to carry it anytime. It’s like when we go play soccer somewhere, we have to give our mobile phone to someone sitting down, so we don’t play with it and it doesn’t fall. My dad, when he, he gives it to me so I keep it for him. He’s not able to keep it when he plays. OK,

Anne:

Isabelle:

Isabelle:

Nishanty:

[Interview

no

so

it’s not

3]

prosthesis to which the individual is not accustomed, the MP ’material load’ that is hard to integrate with the body in a harmonious way: a strange object whose morphology is not body-complementary at all. Seen as such, it is supposed to breach the aesthetic fluidity of the owner’s movements, the elegance of his/her appearance and dress. What may be seen as a typical girls’ concern (and talk) is also echoed by Nishanty’s story about his father and himself going to a soccer game. From his own gender perspective, 67 he complains that the MP is a cumbersome material object that can limit Like

a new

may be

a

one’s movement

(such

as

during

a soccer

game).

establish whether the MP is perceived as an appendage integrated with the body or not, or if it is considered a cool visible part of the self or a component of the useful-fine-looking accessories repertoire. What is worth noting is how this CT copes with one of the crucial dimensions of adolescents’ world of meaning and specific culture: the construction of an image of the physical Self and the relevance of the others’ eyes in such Q process. The main point here is

not to


50

Insofar

as the MP is perceived as an embodied object, it becomes a for reasoning about the aesthetic dimension of the Self, a concern trigger that is a constitutive part of the work of constructing one’s own social identity. Besides its communicative functions and relational uses, MPs seem to enter the culture of adolescents with their material features, giving the adolescents practical support to accomplish at least some developmental stakes. The construction of an image of oneself as an incorporated individual is one of them.

Through an

When

aesthetic of when

action. It also demonstrates the which they act as critical judges of other people’s behaviour as device well as their own in public places. It is precisely on that level, with respect to ways of performing when using a mobile phone, that teenagers transform this technology into a sign of social identity and social

taste: the MP as an

identity-

creating

making claims about manners and forms that regulate MP use, they account for ways ’to wear it’, adolescents reveal their deep

sensitivity to the rules and forms of social extent to

competence. The behaviour that is perhaps most often criticised by teenagers, the one that triggers the greatest amount of shared negative judgements on the social competence of the performer is, the ’Just for show’ behaviour. 68 Most of the stories of our corpus refer to this kind of MP-related behaviour and all of them are ’evaluative stories’, that is narratives through which the teller produces a judgement on the characters and their actions us analyse a lengthy but final discussion to show how participants jointly construct a social judgement through the ongoing conversation.

Let

Example no

14 Anne: Julie:

Isabelle:

You don’t perceive them

Well

different?

of the people who buy them think that it will change their look, but it doesn’t change at all. But I think it changes. It changes because there’s someone at a given time that bought one and it changed toward the negative side becauseI noticed he was a show off and that he was like: ’Haa, I have a mobile phone, Haa I’m hot!’ some

Yeah, sometimes it’s give themselves... The

not positive The look they try to guy who wants to look too much ... It’ss ...

Anne:

like the guy who’s in the bus and who talks on his mobile phone when it nngs. You know, it was turned off, it was just to say ’Look!’. You laugh at him, like, you’re so dumb There’s a line. It gives a style, but it’s not good, the outcome is not positive! So, in the end, the person who uses it for the practical side, well that’s fun you know, or bring it, and even sometimes it’s like ’ha,I have no more time on it’ ’Well, go and get some cards’, you know, when it’s prepaid, things like that. But people for who it’s really just for ’Look, look it’s new’ you know like Ok, i#I understand in some cases it may be negative for the look.

Isabelle:

Yeah, the

...

...

that’ At Anne:

one

some

who wants too much, I’m

thinking ’stop

point you’re fed up!

off, ifI follow what you’re saying, it’s that the image, be it positive or negative, it depends on the way you use it If you use it in the bus to...

Too show

...

______________


51

Isabelle:

Yeah, the one who has it just for the appearance, it won’t give us a good image of him.I mean it’s not right

Julie:

It also

Anne:

But do you like show off

...

...

the person who’s looking at him depends because Isabelle and myself, we don’t like that, but for some people like show offs ’Wow, he’s so hot, he doesn’t use it but he has it anyway!’ on

people who talk on other people’s

phone? Nishanty:

No,

Julie:

But

Anne:

Ok, but that’s the image when the person is talking, but let’s say he has it right here ... All day you know... I have a friend who’s like that, he got it and his image has changed now. It’s up to the point that it’s not the same ... He went ... We have a uniform, and he has found a way to put his mobile phone, well in evidence over the uniform. He was never using it, ok, only a few times, but he always managed so that we knew he had one, so we saw it, he never took it out.

Julie:

no, no. some

like it

...

Anne:

So, if you don’t want you have to hide it?

Julie:

It all

depends

a

negative image

becauseI know the

as a

mobile

phone user

person...I know she doesn’t

it. And this way it makes for a negative image. ButI knew that if she really needed it that if she really used it her image would not have changed for me.I know this person. But if you go by somebody in the subway and he has a mobile phone ... you know you can’t say if he is a show off or if he use

isn’t

Isabelle:

one

you can’t

really know.

You just have to not exaggerate that’s all there always is a limit, it’s like for anything else. You know it’s like those that wear their pants a little low because it’s cool you know to have a slack look. But for some it’s really like their wearing a garbage bag that’s terrible it’s not

really right. Do you agree with that?

Anne:

Nishanty and Julia:

jlntermew

Yes no

3]

series of consecutive turns

Through expressing agreement on what has already been stated, the participants tie their contributions together and jointly construct a judgement on the depicted uses of MPs. The behaviour they are evaluating is not MP use as a social performance as such; it is the forms of acting out this performance that are the very objects of the judgement. It is exactly because the MP use is an action conceived as radically social that its performance has to be informed by some specific rules. These rules are not only ethical or etiquette rules, they are also formal aesthetic a

rules. These govern the visible aspects and forms of the presentation: while showing an MP when wearing a short tee-shirt may be aesthetically


52

fine, overexposing an

it

by deliberately turning

the

jacket back,

is

radically

’out’ behaviour.

The comparative story that concludes this joint reasoning is extremely clear in focusing the collective sanction not on the action per se but on its specific form. With regard to the ’up-to-date’ way to wear pants for teenagers, the social sanction isn’t concerned with having cool pants or adopting the fashionable way of wearing them. It is concerned with excessive exposure. Through this analogy the main speaker restates the point: ’There’s a line’, ’You just have to not exaggerate’, ’there always is a limit’. The passing of an invisible but crucial operating and constraining boundary makes the difference between a competent way of being up to date and a lack of skill in that area. Adolescents seem to consider MP-related gestures and behaviours as texts, narratives through which people are supposed to say who they are. Insofar as they are considered as meaningful and symbolic actions, they are subjected to interpretation and lead to inferences abnout the identity of the performer and their social (in)competence. From the teenagers’ point of view, MP related behaviours are aesthetic ’rules in action’ that define the user as someone with good taste. The breaking of such rules leads to a social stigma: a lack of good taste is a lack of social

competence. The aspect we

want to consider here is that adolescents make

this

technology work as a symbolic tool : through the repertoire of MP-related actions, people are supposed to express and act according to some of a teenager’s dimensions of social life, such

as

’coolness’ and

’up-to-dateness’, fashion and taste. Far from being just a functional ICT needing technological competence, the MP is accounted for as a social action that needs manners and good taste. Insofar as it is seen as such, MP

use

becomes

judgements on

a

an arena of the Self that facilitates inferences and users’ level of social competence.

The aesthetics of wearing an MP and the etiquette of its use constitute specific cultural frames through which adolescents make such a judgement. In Bourdieu’s terms, they use MP forms of action for classifying owners and users.7° In other words, they use MP-related good taste as a ’social weapon’71 to structure their social reality establishing differences with regard to people’s social competence. process of culturalisation of a specific of communication technology by adolescents through an analysis of their it. of about Indeed we assume that individuals construct the ways talking cultural forms of living their everyday life, the sense of things and the meaning of their actions mainly through language and discourse.

Summary and This research investigated the conclusion

Data in this exploratory study show how young people’s uses and discourses on uses of mobile phones work as cultural ways of making and remaking not only the functions, roles and forms of use of a communication technology but moreover some crucial dimensions of their specific culture. Indeed, while some main features of their specific culture integrate and give particular meanings to the MP and related


53

actions, this CT seems to amplify the cultural strategies and resources through which they accomplish the work of living as teenagers. Before exploring the extent of such a theoretical claim, we will summarise the analytical steps of our research that give it empirical evidence. Firstly, the construction of a cultural model of MPs. As we have seen, in the specific social context created by a focused joint discussion among peers, talking about ’young people uses of mobile phones’ is talking about its use in public situations. When engaged in accounting for MP uses and users, young people construct their accounts around a prototypical script. They situate MP use in a scene inhabited by more than one character: the caller, the called (or addressed recipient) and at least one bystander, more or less concerned with the use of the MP. The latter is generally depicted as making inferences and getting information from the telephone conversation he or she is overhearing. Insofar as it is a recurrent discursive pattern, this public dimension of MP use may be considered as the adolescents’ cultural specific model. What makes this communicative practise a specific one, what differentiates it from other types of telephone calls is, from our informants’ point of view, its use in public places. The mobile phone seems to produce a specific location for telephone calls: traditionally private, they are now situated on the public scene and legitimated as inherent to it. Of course, it is not the technology itself that limits its use to the kind of context depicted by our informants. Use in public places is only one of the possible uses inscribed in the machinery and added to the range of the usual contexts of the telephone call as such. We even may go further, arguing that the stage context is not technologically marked as the preferred one. A great deal of work has gone into providing the MP with technological devices that indicate the private dimension as the appropriate one (from the obvious off position to the vibration vs. ring mode). This process of reprivatisation of the MPs delocated communication is echoed by the social side: there is a multiplication of social rules that constantly indicate that public places

the appropriate context for MP calls. By actively underestimating the relevance of such technological and social devices, by creatively deciding which features count the most and make the difference, young people construct their cultural definitions of the MP around a stage prototypical dimension.

are

not

From our perspective, the ’on-stac~e’ category neither indicates a matter of fact nor is intended to describe what really happens. This category is intended to grasp one of the main frames of reference through which young people make sense of this communication technology. By building their accounts on a selected aspect of the technology, considering some aspects to be relevant and others not, and figuring out prototypical scripts through their narratives, adolescents construct locally the cultural model of the object and practises they are jointly accounting for.

We find here one example of the process of symbolic creativity and _ everyday culture construction that derives from the encounter between


54

the material-functional characteristics of a given technology and the work of meaning creation by people. Insofar as they actively use and reflect upon this object, young people actively participate in the larger cultural process of constructing the socially shared cultural representations and interpretation of the CT and its uses. Our second

analytical step concerns the gain of an intersubjective on MP through the other’s eyes. Data from

perspective and the reflection

reveal how the MP works as a trigger for social reasoning among young people. Insofar as it is conceived as a social performance, it triggers teenagers to question themselves on the ethical, politeness and aesthetic dimensions of their social life.

this

study

As we have seen, in telling their stories about MP uses, tellers and co-tellers adopt different voices and take different perspectives to depict the characters, their actions and the consequences of the unfolded behaviours. By taking the audience’s point of view, by using the caller’s perspective, by giving preference to a face-to-face partner leaving the person calling in a by-stander position, young people construct an arena to explore the realm of the social consequences of individual action. That is to say they engage in a basic form of ethical reasoning. In a very consistent way, this issue leads them to theorise also about the relevance of shared norms and appropnate forms of talk on the MP and to refer to

etiquette and politeness

as

way of

coping with these kinds of phenomena.

such a link between ethical concerns and etiquette rules, adolescents use specific social knowledge: etiquette and politeness rules are in fact the pragmatic response to most of the basic ethical concerns of everyday life. They are, in Goffman’s terms, forms of ’practising the situational ethic’.72

Making

Perhaps not surprisingly, when the MP is conceived as a social performance, as an embodied object affecting the visible Self, the rules governing its use are also aesthetic. Young people’s accounts shift towards a reflection on the aesthetic dimension of the visible Self and on ’taste’ as a rationale for social categorisation. Lastly, our third analytical step concerns the construction of a specific culture. In analysing some micro dimensions of a specific phenomenon (the MP in adolescents’ life), the results of our research provide empirical evidence for two main theoretical hypotheses: socialisation is a life span process and culture emerges through discourses, social interaction and behaviour while at the same time it organises their forms and even their topics.

Talking about MPs and accounting for its uses becomes a laboratory of thinking. By taking the other’s perspective, shifting from the user’s position to that of the audience, making judgements on the ways and

social

forms of MP use, treating forms of MP use as a text to account for users’ social identities, teenagers explore and figure out the intersubjective dimension of everyday life. This is not to say that the MP creates the relevance of this issue or determines such concerns as the aesthetic of the Self or the social meaning of taste. As we know, social judgement, concerns about the


55

public consequences of individual action, and the importance of the forms and style of the social self are constitutive parts of the developmental tasks of adolescents. The role of the MP and, moreover, of discourses on the MP, is to generate a new field for this kind of reasoning where young people explore and go deeper into such crucial thematic issues. Data from

our research provide empirical evidence for the hypothesis of mutual construction between a technology of communication and the adolescents’ specific culture. The MP is used, accounted for and interpreted through frames of reference that belong to adolescents’ ’economy of meanings’, and, conversely, the MP makes them relevant and enhances their importance in teenagers’ lives.

a

data show, being or becoming competent with respect to a CT is matter of acquiring and using technological knowledge, it also involves acquiring and possessing social knowledge concerning when, where, for what purposes, to whom and how to use the technology. In other words, it is a matter of developing a specific form of communicative competence, the main consequences of which seem to affect the identity-making process.

As

our

not

only a

its related forms of use as means for saying who they are and who those around them are. Using and interpreting both as identity-making devices, teenagers explore, construct and apply some main categories to culturally organise and make

Teenagers consider the MP and

relevant distinctions in their social world. In other words, they build on and construction of the

sociological thought, that is, a reflection forms of everyday social life. Far from

being a secondary aspect, these concerns about the ethical of aspects interaction, politeness and etiquette, the formal rules of everyday actions and the identity dimensions at stake seem to be a constitutive part of the technological culture of adolescents. The MP seems to work in this direction, making it crucial to elaborate reflective thought on the social meanings and intersubjective nature of technologically mediated communication. research demonstrates that by talking among themselves people theorise about the social world, social identities, norms and rules of social action. That is they produce culture through discursive interaction and accomplish (part of) their work of becoming a competent member of society. We may then conclude that when !CTs become a topic of conversation, the shared reference of a situated and multi-party talk, an object not only of use but also of discourse, they work as socialisation devices, material components of everyday life that organise and are organised by cultural frames of reference. In

synthesis,

about

a

CT,

our

young

Acknowledgement- This study Bell Canada Chair

on

is

part of an overall research

emergmg

technologies


programme

parity fmanced by the

! z

56

Notes

1.

From a radically ethnomethodological-constructionist perspective, the cultural models that organise everyday life in intersubjectively shared ways are seen as constructed moment-by-moment by the ways people participate in social events. See H. Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Englewood Cliff: Prentice Hall, 1967); P. Giglioli and A. Dal Lago (eds), Etnometodologia (Bologna: II Mulino, 1983). a bottom-up analytical perspective, the constructionist approach conceives the structures and the meanings of social action as products of the creative process of culture-making through everyday actions and discourses. Of

Adopting

radically bottom-up view may be counterbalanced by the cognitive cultural models See, R. D’Andrade, ’Cultural Meaning Systems’ in D. Holland and N. Quinn (eds), Cultural Models in Language and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); R D’Andrade and C. Strauss (eds), Human Motives and Cultural Models (Cambridge: Cambridge University course,

this

perspective

on

Press, 1992). From a more up-down perspective, the cognitive approach sees the cultural models as prototypical, language-based scripts of events that work as frames of reference for inference-making and as guides for appropriate, understandable and accountable actions. From a phenomenological perspective, both processes need to be taken into account. People are seen as creative social actors engaged in contructing the meaning, sense and social organisation of their world. This process is conceived as radically embedded in and possible because of the cultural frames and material resources available in the world where people live. See A. Duranti, Linguistics Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), K.J Gergen and G.R. Semin, ’Everyday Understanding in Science and Daily Life’ in G.R. Semin and K.J. Gergen (eds), Everyday Understanding: Social and Scientific Implications (London: Sage); P. Jedlowski, ’Tra fenomenologia e sociologia’, Encyclopaideia Rivista di

pedagogia, fenomenologia, formazione, 2,

no.

1

(1998),

pp 111-118.

2.

M. De Certeau, L’invention du quotidien (Paris: UGE, 1980); A. Appadurai (ed), The Social Life of Things (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); B. Latour, Aramis, ou l’amour de techniques (Paris: la Découverte, 1992); A. Gras, B. Jorges and V. Scardigli (eds), Sociologie des techniques de la vie quotidienne (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1992); A. Semprini, L’objet comme procès et comme action (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995), A. Semprini (ed), II senso delle cose. I significati sociali e culturali degli oggetti quotidiani (Milano: Franco Angeli,

3.

Livingstone, ’The Meaning of Domestic Technologies: A Personal Construct Analysis of Familial Gender Relations’ in R Silverstone and E. Hirsch (eds), Consuming technologies. Media and Information in Domestic Spaces (London: Routledge, 1992); Semprini, 1995, A.H. Caron and L. Caronia, ’Active Users and Active Objects. The Mutual Construction of Families and Communication Technologies’, Convergence, 7, no 3 (2001), pp. 39-61; E. Lally, At Home With Computers (Oxford: Berg, 2002).

1999)

4.

S.

L. Caronia, La socializzazione at media. Contesti, interazioni (Milano. Guerini. 2002).

e

pratiche

educative

nella vita

quotidiana (Milano.

Bruno

5.

P. Jedlowski, Storie comuni. La Mondadori, 2000), p. 58

6.

D. Boden and H L. Molotch, ’The Compulsion of Proximity’ in R Friedland and D. Boden (eds), Now/Here. Space, Time and Modernity (Berkeley: University of

narrazione

California Press, 1994), pp. 257-286. 7.

E. Ochs and L. Capps, (1996), pp. 19-43.

’Narrating the Self’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 25


57 8.

9.

S. Livingstone and M. Bovill (eds), Children and Their Changing Media Environment. A European Comparative Study (London: Lawrence Erlbaum,

2001). See, among others, I. Pool (ed), The Social Impact of Telephone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977); E. Schegloff, ’Identification and Recognition in Telephone Conversation Openings’ in G. Psathas (ed), Everyday Language: Studies in Ethnomethodology (New York: Irvington, 1979), pp. 23-78; C. Fisher, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); D. Zimmerman Umble, ’The Amish and

telephone. Resistence and reconstruction’ in R. Silverstone and E. Hirsch (eds), 1992, pp. 183-194; V. Manceron, ’Tous en ligne: usage sociaux et

the

au sein d’un réseau de jeunes parisiens’, Réseaux, no. (1997), pp. 205-217; N. Baron, ’History Lessons: Telegraph, Telephone, and E-mail as Social Discourse’ in B. Naumann (ed), Dialogue Analysis and the Mass Media. Proceedings of the International Conference, Erlangen, 2-3 April 1998 (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1999), pp. 1-34; F. Bercelli and G. Pallotti, ’Conversazioni telefoniche’ in C. Bazzanella (ed), Sul dialogo (Milano: Guerini, 2002), pp. 177-192.

modes d’interaction

82-83

10.

The

more

traditional category of

’mobility’ (or nomadic communication)

seems

different (while interdependent) aspects of this form of communication.To gain a better understanding of the mutual construction of the user and the technology, these aspects need to be distinguished and grasped in details. For analytical purposes, we propose to distinguish ’delocated’ vs. ’mobile’ because those terms refer to two different (while interdependent) aspects of the communication ’Delocated communication’ is a category concerning the object With this category we want to account for and make relevant the technical and material features of the object that make possible ’mobile communication’. The later one, indeed, is a category of action, referring and focusing more on the user and his/her movements. to

cover

too many

11.

E. Katz and A. Aakhus, Perpetual Contact. Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

12.

E. Mante, ’The Netherlands and the USA 2002.

13.

P.

14

Jukka-Pekka, ’Finland,

compared’

Mobile Culture’,

in

E. Katz and A. Aakhus,

E. Katz and A.

Aakhus, 2002. See R. Ling ’ "C’est bien d’être joignable": l’usage du téléphone cellulaire et mobile chez les jeunes norvegiens’, Réseaux , nos. 92-93 (1999), pp. 261-291; R. Ling and B. Yttri, ’ ’Nobody sits at home and waits for the telephone to ring’: Micro and Hyper coordination throug the use of the mobile telephone’, Report no. 30/99, Telenor Research and Development (Oslo, 1999), R.E. Grinter and M.A. Eldridge, ’Y do tngrs luv 2 txt msg?’ in W. Prinz, M. Jarke, Y. Rogers, K Schmidt and V. Wulf (eds), Proceedings of the Seventh European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (Dordrecht. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), pp. 219-238; G. Cosenza,’I messaggi SMS’ in C. Bazzanella (ed), Sul dialogo (Milano: Guerini, 2002). Specifically with respect to mobile phone use by young people, the data is particularly interesting. In some countries, it became an important social phenomenon. For example, 17 per cent of British children aged 5 to 11and 58 per cent of secondary students aged 1 1 to 16 have a mobile phone (’Children with a mobile phone, access to a computer or the internet’ in Social a

in

Focus in Brief: Children, Census at School, Office for National Statistics, UK, 2000). In Sweden, 75 per cent of the young people between the ages of 15 and 17 have access to mobile phone, as do 82 per cent of 18 to19 year olds (Orvesto Konsument, C. Falck, Sifo Research and Consulting, 1999). In Norway 75 per cent of teens aged between 13 and 20 owned or had exclusive


58

of a mobile phone (R. Ling, Norwegian Teens, Mobile Telephony and SMS Use in School, Kjeller: Telenor R & D, 2000). In Italy, 76 per cent of young people between 14 and 17 own a mobile phone (Census Foundation, Internal Report on Mobile Phone Use by Young People, Rome, 2001). The phenomenon is smaller in Canada, but still growing. In fact, in 2002, 35 per cent of young Canadians between the ages of 12 and 17, and 60 per cent of those between 18 and 24 either owned or had bought a mobile phone in the last two years (Bureau of Broadcast Measurement, Sondage Radio, Canada, 2002). use

15.

J.M. Kayani, C.E. Wotring and E.J. Forrets, ’Relational Control and Interactive Media Choice in Technology Mediated Communication’, Human Communication Research, 22, no. 3 (1996), pp. 399-421.

16.

But see Ling 1999; Ling and Yttri 1999, Grinter and Eldridge 2001 for some worthy exceptions. The original research design was conceived in 1997 where a first exploratory study was done, using an ethnographic type approach to investigate

17.

communication patterns with families in the new information and communication technology environment Telephone, television, computer and internet technologies were considered (see Caron and Caronia, 2001). The our study on focus groups with teenagers and mobile technologies, is now reported here in this article.The third part which is now underway consists of case studies where real time actual conversations of teenagers are recorded over a three week period and analysed. W. Damon, ’The Nature of Socio-Cognitive Change in the Developing Child’ in W.F. Overton (ed.), The Relationship between Social and Cognitive Development (Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1983), p. 103 B. Rogoff, ’Introduction: Thinking and Learning in Social Context’ in B. Rogoff and J. Lave (eds), Everyday Cognition: Its Development in Social Context (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 1-8; J. Lave, Cognition in Practice (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988). C U. Shantz, ’Social Cognition’ in P.H Mussen (ed.), Handbook of Child Psychology, vol. III: Cognitive Development (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1983), p. 497. J. Heritage, Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology (Cambridge: Polite Press, 1984). E. Ochs, Culture and Language Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); D. Boden and D.H. Zimmerman (eds), Talk and Social Structure. Studies in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991); C. Goodwin and A. Duranti, ’Rethinking Context: An Introduction’ in A. Duranti and C. Goodwin (eds), Rethinking Context. Language as an Interactive Phenomenon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 1-42.

second part of

18.

19

20.

21.

22.

23.

Heritage, 1984,

p. 259.

24.

Duranti, 1997; L. Caronia, Costruire la

conoscenza

(Firenze.

La Nuova Italia,

1997). 25

Duranti, 1997.

26.

J. Potter and M. Wetherell, Discourse and Social and Behaviour (London: Sage, 1987).

27.

28.

R. Silverstone, E. Hirsch and D

Psychology. Beyond Attitudes

Morley, ’Information and Communication

Technologies and the Moral Economy of the Household’ in R. Silverstone and E. Hirsch (eds), 1992, pp 15-31. P. Rabinow and M. Sullivan (eds), Interpretive Social Science: A Second Look (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).


59 29.

C.L. Briggs, Learning How to Ask. A Sociolinguistic Appraisal of the Role of Interview in Social Science Research (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); E.G. Mishler, Research Interviewing: Context and Narratives

30.

Caronia, 1997.

31.

Palen, M. Salzman and E. Youngs, ’Going Wireless: Behaviour & Practice of New Mobile Phone Users’ in D.G. Durand (ed), Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2000) (Philadelphia, New York: ACM Press, 2000), pp. 201-210.

32.

Potter and

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)

33.

L.

Wetherell, 1987; Mishler, 1986; Briggs, 1986; Caronia, 1997. Taylor, D. Rudolph and R. Smith, ’Story-Telling as a Theory-Building Activity’, Discourse Processes, 15 (1992), pp. 22-37; E.

Ochs,

C.

Jedlowsky, 34.

2000.

Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, of Meaning (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). E. Goffman, Forms of Talk (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981) Goffman, 1981, p. 132.

J.

1986); J. Bruner, Acts

35. 36 37.

As Goffman (1981, p. 133) pointed out, ’the relation(s) among speakers, addressed recipient, and unaddressed recipient(s) are complicated, significant and not much explored’.

38.

M. Goodwin, He-Said-She-Said . Talk as Social Organization among Black Children (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 229.

39.

Ling, 1999; A. Haberg, Tilgjengelighet til glede og besvar: En studie av bruk av holdninger til mobil telefon som ny technologi , Instittut for Kulturstudier, Oslo, Oslo, 1997 (quoted in Ling, 1999); G. Marrone, C’era (Roma: Meltemi, 1999). The content of the stories and their being about ’inappropriate uses’ and ’face Universitetet

una

40.

i

voltail telefonino

work’ will be 41. 42.

analysed below. C. Bazzanella, ’Dialogic Repetition’ in H. Loffler (ed), Dialoganalyse IV (Tubingen: Max Niemayer, 1993) pp. 285-294 E. Schegloff, G. Jefferson and H. Sacks, ’The Preference for Self-Correction in the Organization of Repair in Conversation’, Language, 53, no. 2 (1977), pp. 361-382.

43.

et al., ’Media Use and the Relationships of Children Teenagers with their Peer Groups. A Study of Finnish, Spanish and Swiss , 13, no. 4 (1998). Cases’, European Journal of Communication

Suess, A. Suoninen,

D.

and 44.

Whether a member of the group itself or of the research team, the interviewer’s official role was to make participants engage in a topic-centred, focused discussion. It becomes easy to claim here that the discursive data are biased, i.e. they are created by the questions proposed by the interviewer. Adopting an ethnographic approach, it is hard to argue for biased conversational material insofar as every conversation is seen as a joint product of the people who

participate. See N. Wolfson, ’Speech Events and Natural Speech: Some

Implications for Sociolinguistic Methodology’, Language in Society , 5 (1976), 189-209; W. Labov and D. Fanshell, Therapeutic Discourse. Psychotherapy as Conversation (New York: Academic Press, 1977); Briggs, 1986; Mishler, 1986; Caronia, 1997. From a conversation analysis point of pp.

is no ’spontaneous’ discourse in a strict sense of the term and there biased discourse insofar as the insertion of a topic in conversation is way to deviate, give new direction, and propose the speaker’s

view there is

also

always

no

a


60 candidate topic as the possible new relevant one. According to this theoretical frame work, the interviewers’ efforts at topic managing are similar to what happens in naturally occurring conversations where and when someone engages in projecting the thematic flow of the talk. 45.

This may be obvious in the case of the ’invited stories’ (E.C. Cuff and D.W. Francis, ’Some Features of ’Invited Stories’ about Marriage Breakdown’, International Journal of Sociology of Language, 18 (1978), pp. 11-133) where one of the speakers proposes the scene and asks for some examples. But we also collected narratives in which the public location of the MP use was a topic created by the participants while linking their turns of talk to previous ones.

46

We refer here to the third part of

our larger research project that is presently underway where we adopted a case study approach. Data gathered using log books and recording MP conversations in real time. Our preliminary analysis

confirms other results using surveys and questionnaires: that 50 per cent of young people’s actual uses of MP are made in home when nobody is present 47. 48. 49.

50.

(Grinter and Eldridge, 2001) Potter and Wetherell, 1987; Caronia, 1997. N. Quinn and D. Holland, ’Culture and Cognition’ in D. Holland and N. Quinn (eds), 1987, pp. 3-42, D’Andrade and Strauss, 1992. Goffman, 1981, p. 132 E. Goffman, Interaction Ritual (Garden City: Doubleday, 1967); Goffman, 1981.

51. 52.

53. 54.

55. 56.

Critique sociale du jugement (Paris: Minuit, 1979). E.N. Goody (ed), Questions and Politeness: Strategies in Social Interaction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); P. Brown and S.S. Levinson, Politeness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). B. Glaser and A. Strauss, The Discovery of Grounded Theory (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967) Goodwin, 1990, p. 142. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin University of Texas Press, 1981). Bakhtin, 1981. P

Bourdieu,

La distinction.

57.

R. Ling, ’ "One can speaks about common manners!". the use of mobile telephones in inappropriate situations’, Report 32/96, Telenor Research & Development (Oslo: 1996); Palen, Salzman and Youngs, 2000.

58.

Goffman, 1967.

59.

Of course, the accounts analysed here are context-dependent and clearly result from the research setting, goals and methodology. Nevertheless, they were produced during multi-party conversations among peers. If we accept the constructionist thesis that all talk-in-interaction results from specific constraints, the accounts we collected may be considered as an example of what happens when young people or adolescents meet and talk about the uses of the MP, no matter what event leads to that talk

60

On linguistic, pragmatic features and politness concerns regarding email communication, see, among others, P. Violi, ’Electronic Dialogue Between Orality and Literacy: A Semiotic Approach’ in Cmejrkovà et al (eds), Dialogue in the Hearth of Europe (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1998), pp. 263-270; Baron, 1999; N. Baron, Alphabet to E-mail. How Written English Evolved and Where It’s Heading (London: Routledge, 2000); A. Garcea and C. Bazzanella, ’Discours rapporté et courrier electronique’, Faits de langue, no. 1 (2002), pp. 233-246.


61 61.

62. 63 64. 65.

Goffman, 1967, 1981; A. Roversi, ’Introduzione all’edizione italiana’ in N. Elias, La civiltà delle buone maniere (Bologna: II Mulino, 1998), pp. IX-XIX. Goffman, 1981, p. 132. M. Dallari,I testi dell’esserci (Torino: II Segnalibro, 2000). M Dallari, Lo specchio e l’altro (Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1990). L. Balduzzi (ed), Le voci del corpo (Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 2002).

66.

If we compare our trend to data from research in other countries, we can advance the following hypothesis: the aesthetic perception of the MP, its becoming a part of the user’s body, depends on the user’s familiarity with the object and its material dimension. For instance, in Italy, where the diffusion of MPs among young people is now well established, young people’s talk about the MP refers to it as an integrated body part, something that is consistent with the body forms and fluid with its movements (see Cosenza, 2002). The same seems to hold true for northern European countries (see Ling 1999; Ling and Yttri, 1999). For the aesthetic dimensions inscribed in the cultural discourse about the MP, see Marrone 1999.

67.

On gendered coping with the media, see D. Lemish, T. Liebes and V. Seidman, ’Gendered Media Meanings and Uses’ in S Livingstone and M. Bovill (eds), Children and Their Changing Media Environment (London: Erlbaum, 2001), pp. 263-282.

68.

Ling, 1999; Ling and Yttri, 1999. Labov and Fanshell, 1977. Bourdieu, 1979. V. Zolberg, ’Taste as a Social Weapon’ pp. 511-515. Goffman, 1981, p. 132.

69. 70. 71.

72.

see

in

, Contemporary Sociology


4

(1986),