Moving between the conversation “at hand” and the “handheld” conversation : participation in family dinners with smartphones

This dissertation investigates naturalistic data to explain how participants bring smartphones into face-to-face interaction. From a corpus of 63 video-recorded family dinner interactions that I collected over 20 months, I identified 16 family dinners that included in total 46 cases of phone use. These form the data set for this study. Over 50% of phone use cases were by parents, who often have ways to make their phone use acceptable despite the “no phone” rules they create. Applying a multimodal-conversational analytic methodology, I transcribed activities in which participants bring phones into the interaction, and I studied the transcripts and the video recordings to discern patterns in how phones enter interactions, and how participation and attention distribution change with the “phone participant.” Goffman’s (1963) model of social interaction provides a conceptual framework to study these data: smartphone interactions are explained as side involvements to the dominant involvement of the family dinner interaction. An ongoing concern in both popular culture and by some scholars (e.g., Turkle, 2015) has been how interruptive and damaging smartphones can be to modern conversations; however, until now, no study has examined actual natural conversations to investigate this concern. Through an examination of actual conversations, I have identified, described, and analyzed diverse patterns and factors affecting how people move between face-to-face and mediated interactions—that is, between the conversation “at hand” and the “handheld” conversation. This dissertation details the integration of smartphones into multiparty interactions, how the smartphone changes participation in family dinner interactions, and other factors bearing on these conversational moments, including the phone user’s technical competence, how coparticipants respond, and how the interactional space is structured. In short, this study reveals the diversity of the practices by which smartphones are introduced and used in face-to-face conversations and shows that, while some phone use can be interruptive to conversations, more striking are the ways people are developing to integrate phones into their conversations without disrupting them and thus, how they are making phone use acceptable to their coparticipantsCommunication Studie