Uses of IC technologies in natural situations: an ethnomethodological approach of activity spaces hybridization

Like other IC technologies, mobile phones are «made at home with the world» (Sacks) through a contextual work, by which users either keep their technological-mediated activity in isolation from their surroundings or find and build connections between them. Because they use audio records or logs of the mediated exchanges, classical studies on remote communication, either on Internet or on landline or mobile phones, have often neglected how these mediated exchanges are visually kept in isolation from their surroundings, or are becoming a part of the proximal setting. Based on video records of phone conversations, either synchronous and vocal, or asynchronous and written, this paper will investigate how the structure of these activities in progress shapes its participation frameworks, and how proximal participants, through their contribution and orientations to the communicative affordances, find how to participate, or how to keep apart from those remote exchanges. The first part of the paper will focus on how the structure of a phone conversation in progress in a domestic lounge progressively makes family matters relevant. It will be found that an injunction turns to be produced as a hybridized object, which takes part both to the closing section of the ongoing phone conversation and to the re-engagement into proximal activities and family life. Analysis will then turn to investigate how participants involved in a multi-activity setting, in which a member opens a chat session on his mobile phone, articulate their various involve­ments with the reception, the reading and the writing of messages. Asynchronous communication provides numerous differential accesses to the building of remote conversation. We will examine how participants establish or control the access to the remote exchange.