A. Weilemann. “i can’t talk now, i’m in a fitting room”: formulating availability and location in mobile phone conversations. Environment and Planning A, 35(9):1589–1605, 2003. [pdf]

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This paper describes an analysis of recorded phone conversations. The author tried to understand the interrelations of location, activity, and availability. Indeed the author showed how in mobile phone conversations people exchange spatial information to infer the availability of the other to talk. Place can be inferred from the activity and vice-versa as people might have a good understanding of their peers whereabouts.

In this paper I investigate the ways in which participants in mobile-phone conversations orient to each other’s location, activities, and availability. By looking at data from recorded mobile-phone conversations, I use a conversation analytic approach to make initial observations on the character of mobile-phone conversations. I found that the frequent question “what are you doing?” sometimes caused a location to be given as part of the answer which shows how location, activity, and availability are strongly related. The participants thus obtained information about location, when this was considered relevant, through asking about activity. Location seemed especially relevant if it provided information about a future meeting. In some of the conversations where it seemed there was something going on where the ‘called party’ was located, the ‘caller’ reacted by initiating the conversation with a strategy which gave the called party a chance to end the conversation.