Temporality and the cooperative infrastructure of human communication: Noticings to delay and to accelerate onward movement in mobile interaction

Abstract

This article examines how mobile participants, at interactionally delicate moments, deploy noticings to invite joint attention on objects in the speaker's vicinity. Complementing recent accounts of environmentally occasioned noticings, the focus of this study is on noticings as a practice to delay and, by contrast, to accelerate joint onward movement through museum spaces. It is argued that the interactional function of these noticings is, first, to draw the co-participant's attention to objects that they treat as noteworthy, and second, to request movement towards the speaker in order to jointly orient to the noticeable. The analysis shows that participants may launch noticings at opportune moments to serve their own spatiotemporal trajectory, either by detaining or by prompting co-participants on. The analysis draws on the methodology of Multimodal Conversation Analysis and a corpus of naturally occurring mobile interactions recorded with external cameras and eye-tracking glasses. Our observations on the double function of noticings in the local context may shed light on different ways in which we enact and draw on the cooperative infrastructure of human communication in social interaction.