Social Aspects of “Absent Presence” in the Use of Mobile Phones in Public Urban Spaces

This paper explores how, in the context of the increasing mediated permeability of the boundaries between the realms of home, privacy, in public, work and leisure, people use mobile phones to communicate with absent others whilst in public urban spaces, near others who are physically present, that is, how people negotiate place and presence when “on the phone”. Our ethnographic research of quotidian practices employed by mobile phone users in public spaces in Zagreb, Croatia, confirms that the critique put forward by some media scholars that media technologies create a homogenous, placeless world, is rather exaggerated. Place is reconstituted through a variety of ethnomethodological, and culturally specific practices which we refer to as manoeuvres of spatial juggling, practices which allow people to integrate their presence in the physical and in the virtual worlds. We identify a number of such practices, and also highlight which moral, cognitive and ritual components of micro interactions in public are challenged during mobile phone use. We conclude that, though significantly contingent and fluid, mobile phone interactions do not annihilate place but transform it into an “absent presence”