World attending in interaction: Multitasking, spatializing, narrativizing with mobile devices and Tinder

Abstract

Studies of new mobilities have emphasized changes in spatialization processes affecting conditions for conversational interaction. Conversations from four Ethiopian-Israeli male teens walking in a northern, peripheral Israeli city to and from pickup games (soccer/football, basketball) at public parks are analyzed. The data selected below all involve talk whilst using a social networking application called Tinder. Analyses follow a narrative practices approach (De Fina and Georgakopoulou, 2008, 2011), particularly that of small stories (Georgakopoulou, 2007). These teens are found to be world attending (a subtype of breaking-news stories) in voicing their noticings of the perceptible surroundings amidst pursuit of individual local interactional projects, i.e. a one-upmanship often exploitive of narrative practices of projections, i.e., unrealized possibilities, the irrealis. The introduction of mobile devices into conversational interactional space provides an added/resource of potential items (referents) to be attended to and thus creates a continued state of incipient multitasking across offline and online spaces.