The food courier and his/her mobile phone

This chapters shed light on mobile socialities via a focus on bicycling food couriers, a group of workers who holds a peripheral position in the power geometry of mobility. The absence of proper workplace justifies a particular focus on the mobile phone. Hence, the chapter is a theoretical enquiry in order to elaborate the all-encompassing role of the mobile phone for this kind of work; how it is both a prerequisite for the execution of it and crucial for the comfort between the jobs, enabling social interaction as well as distraction. The socio-material conditions in this new type of work environment, I argue, constitute a kind of mobile sociality, where the two ‘entities’, mobility and sociality, are articulated in new configurations. The chapter highlights the entanglement of online and offline in transport work; how these dimensions are interdependent in the mobile work. It also highlights the dialectic between mobility and immobility, which in this context is context is expressed as working (mobility) and waiting (immobility). The chapter discusses how the waiting can be utilized. Waiting, according to Ben Highmore, is time for distraction which in turn may be understood as ‘mobility of attention’. In this context it means that the individual courier may appropriate a slice of time and space to build a social and emotional structure for oneself. He or she is dwelling; feeling at home through familiar mobile phone practices and through communication with close ones. The chapter ends with a discussion on how the oscillation between work and dwelling can be used for elaborations on the dialectic between mobility and immobility, and how this may be theorized through the concepts ‘ambient (mobile phone) practices’ and ‘ambient communication’