F. R. Bentley and C. J. Metcalf. Location and activity sharing in everyday mobile communication. In CHI ’08: CHI ’08 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, pages 2453–2462, New York, NY, USA, 2008. ACM. [PDF]
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This paper presents an interesting study of location-disclosure in mobile phone conversations. They were interested in what kind of location and activity information is provided and how context might influence this information disclosure. The authors were particularly interested in the purposed of disclosing location and activity information. The authors felt that there was a need for understanding additional details of location-sharing in mundane situations and detailing the requests-for and responses-to location disclosures.
The authors used a pretty interesting technique, enrolling 7 participants who recorded their phone calls and then analyzed the resulting 176 recordings looking for patterns and similarities. First they parsed each message using annotation techniques refined in the conversation analysis domain (see Hutchby and Wooffitt, 1992, or Psathas, 1995). They also used qualitative techniques to look for affinity diagrams modeled on grounded theory.
They found several significant correlations, like the association of the disclosure of current location at the opening of a conversation. Past location was often disclosed in the middle of a sentence, while future location was more often disclosed at the end of a conversation. The authors distinguished 8 different situations in which location/activity is disclosed: 1) social awareness in order to feel more connected with other people; 2) managing availability; 3) planning to meet and micro-coordination to reach proximity; 4-7) disclosures to help others to check whether a person need anything from a particular location and to show caring; 5-6) disclosure as a mechanism to continue or to end the conversation; finally 8) as a process awareness in work.
An interesting finding is that according to the authors, is that people in the same social network often can infer each others’ whereabouts with a great precision. However they are often unsure of the exact transitioning times between activities or locations. Often these correct inferences are constructed from a small amounts of seemingly ambiguous data given past knowledge about that person’s interactions with the world. The authors call this a ambient noise, which is ofen thought by other researchers as something that needs to be filtered out. However, this study points out the importance of this information for enabling the function of grounding in the group, which serves coordination and therefore communication and collaboration.