Smartphone Communication

Interactions in the App Ecosystem

Francisco Yus

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000433142
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Filología
• Sous-sujet: Lingüística

This book offers a unique model for understanding the cognitive underpinnings, interactions and discursive effects of our evolving use of smartphones in everyday app-mediated communication, from text messages and GIFs to images, video and social media apps.

Adopting a cyberpragmatics framework, grounded in cognitive pragmatics and relevance theory, it gives attention to how both the particular interfaces of different apps and users' personal attributes influence the contexts and uses of smartphone communication. The communication of emotions – in addition to primarily linguistic content – is foregrounded as an essential element of the kinds of ever-present paralinguistic and phatic communication that characterises our exchange of memes, GIFs, "likes, " and image- and video-based content. Insights from related disciplines such as media studies and sociology are incorporated as the author unpacks the timeliest questions of our digitally mediated age.

Aimed primarily at scholars and graduate students of communication, linguistics, pragmatics, media studies, and sociology of mass media, Smartphone Communication traffics in topics that will likewise engage upper-level undergraduate students.

1
Introduction

The smartphone phenomenon

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200574-1

1.1 The ubiquity of smartphone communication

Nowadays it is almost impossible to walk on the street without coming across someone typing on their smartphone. These devices are ubiquitous, much more than first-generation mobile phones. Unlike those mobile phones, smartphones are small-sized computers that people use for myriad purposes, beyond the oral or video conversations that initially constituted the main point of mobile phones compared to today’s massive use of apps. In the smartphone era, communication between humans has not decreased; talk has, though. The app ecosystem on smartphones, as labelled in the title of the book, offers users a whole range of options for interaction beyond traditional phone calls.

Certainly, the number of options for interaction and communication that we are currently offered through smartphone apps has soared in comparison to previous devices: “persistently internet-connected smartphones afford communication patterns as complex as those available on the personal computer. Additionally, they offer possibilities for access to online information as well as various forms of content consumption and production, including multimedia and games” (Bertel 2013: 6). The smartphone can be considered a metamedium, as proposed by Márquez (2017), a platform which houses many old and new media. Similarly, Jansson (2013, in Pettegrew and Day 2015: 124) proposed the term mediatisation for a transformation brought about by technology that not only influences our communication but also reflects how other social processes become inseparable from smartphone technology and dependent on it across a broad variety of domains and at different levels. Finally, such devices fit the label of polymedia (Madianou 2014, 2020), understood as an environment of communicative opportunities that functions as an “integrated structure” within which each individual medium is defined in relation to all other media (thus fitting the label app ecosystem proposed in this book). This kind of interrelated structure satisfies the need for imbrication and complementation between apps that we find on smartphones nowadays. Indeed, in polymedia “the emphasis shifts from a focus on the qualities of each particular medium as a discrete technology to an understanding of new media as an environment of affordances” (Madianou and Miller 2012: 170).

Framed within this app ecosystem, smartphones give people enhanced opportunities to strengthen personal relationships via more efficient relational coordination. As Pettegrew and Day (2015: 126) stressed, new technologies such as smartphone apps are reshaping various forms of communication and workplace relationships along with everyday forms of talk. Such advances in the digital age form a collective dimension of interpersonal communication that fully centres technology on our day-to-day experiences. Similarly, Wei and Lo (2006) proposed six gratifications arising from smart-phone use: information seeking, social utility, affection, fashion and status, mobility, and accessibility.

At the very heart of this new media ecosystem lies the app as the quintessential unit of smartphone management. Especially for younger generations, apps serve as the gate through which they conceptualise the world they live in. This ecosystem of smartphone apps entails that users can pursue a wide variety of goals with their devices and add new apps when new personal needs turn up in the future: “Users decide what a smartphone is for themselves, rather than just adopting a given product” (Jung 2014: 300). As Gardner and Davis (2013: 8) emphasised, whatever human beings might want should be provided by apps; and if the desired app still does not exist, it should be devised right away; and if no app can be imagined or devised, then the desire simply does not (or at least should not) matter.

The smartphone has invaded face-to-face interactions too. People often look at their smartphones for a substantial amount of time and dismiss those around them in their physical environment, often causing uncomfortable situations. Reid (2018: 5) states in this respect that we have normalised our techno-lives: “We have come to accept that smartphones lurk in the background of every conversation and interaction, and we rarely expect full attentiveness from one another. We excuse our smartphone habits as important and necessary, constantly making justifications for their presence.”

Two main aims underlie this book. On the one hand, it aims to describe the issues involved in the production, communication, and interpretation of discourses on smartphones, additionally providing a theoretical, (cyber) pragmatic account of the kinds of interaction that are sustained through these devices. On the other hand, the book ultimately aims to find an explanation to why people find smartphone communication so interesting, why users get so addicted to information and interactions on these devices even though they are often trivial, cues-filtered and lacking means of contextualisation; why users dismiss the rich face-to-face environments around them and prefer to remain glued to the smartphone screen, isolating themselves from the physical world and living their digital lives so intensely through these devices instead.

The smartphone, undoubtedly the most pervasive and influential 21st-century invention, was born in 2007 when the first iPhone appeared in the market with its app-mediated interface managed on a touchscreen and with the possibility to download apps. Since then, as shown in Figure 1.1, many other companies have copied or developed this kind of interface; and the evolution of these devices has been amazing.

Figure 1.1 The evolution of smartphones with some representative devices per year.

The smartphone is not just a mobile phone; it can actually be described in more accurate terms as a portable personal computer (Masur 2019: 187). Indeed, smartphones offer apps for any user’s need (synchronous messaging communication, social networking, email, location-based services, camera, photo editing, video…) in a single device. This app ecosystem, together with internet connectivity and their capacity to track users’ location, stand out as the three key features of smartphones nowadays (Bertel 2013: 13).

With the countless apps that are available to download on smartphones, users can take advantage of these devices for entertainment, search for information, and/or use apps to maintain relationships. This device is also optimal to achieve hedonic goals, when users are bored and just want to “kill time.” As such, smartphones have proved to be addictive in two realms. Firstly, addiction to the smartphone itself, with users carrying the device with them at all times as an extension of their bodies (a digital companion in the words of Carolus et al. 2019), and causing nomophobia (fear of not having the smartphone with them); and secondly, addiction to the apps installed, which causes fomo (fear of missing out, that is, fear of not accessing all the barrage of information provided by these apps, for instance, missing out on the latest news about the celebrities that the user follows).

Both addictions (to the device and to apps) can be easily understood given the range of interactive and communicative options that the smart-phone ecosystem offers, which may include voice-based audio files, written messages (i.e. typed and often oralised using what will be labelled as text alteration in Chapter 5, in conjunction with visual aids such as emojis, stickers and GIFs), pictures, videos, and links or other digital content, to quote but a few. Depending on the app through which these types of communications take place, the content can be extremely private and sensitive (e.g. in dyadic messaging conversations) or non-sensitive and public (for instance, when posting a publicly available picture on a photo-sharing platform such as Instagram for others to see and comment on).

1.2 Main objectives and underlying hypotheses

This book has as its objective to provide the first ever fully cyberpragmatic account of smartphone communication (Yus 2011a).¹ If purely pragmatic analyses of internet-mediated communication are scarce (see Herring 2013b), such pragmatic analysis applied to smartphone communication is certainly even more scarce. Therefore, the ultimate aim of this volume consists in filling this gap existing in (cyber)pragmatic research.

Its foundations can be identified in my theory of cyberpragmatics. According to the premise underlying this book, all smartphone-mediated communication can be explained by resorting to basic claims regarding a cognitive and inherently human search for relevance (also in their everyday smartphone interactions), paired with human reluctance to expend too much effort in these smartphone-mediated interactions. Broadly speaking, relevance theory (the theoretical foundation of cyberpragmatics) claims that, because our minds are relevance-oriented, we tend to focus our attention on what will most probably provide us with some interpretive reward, or expressed differently, on what is bound to be beneficial to us. Therefore, in smartphone communication users are also bound to show a biological tendency to pay attention to the most relevant stimuli on their smartphones, the ones that draw their attention more than other competing stimuli. At the same time, they will be discouraged if their smartphone interactions demand too much mental effort, for instance apps that demand too many taps on the screen to get to the desired information. However, as will be seen in the book, very often users are ready to spend additional effort in managing certain apps if they get some reward from these interactions that compensates for this extra effort.

Secondly, relevance theory claims that all utterances have a number of possible interpretations, though not all of them are equally likely (i.e. equally relevant). An addressee will inevitably tend to select the most relevant interpretation. But when it comes to smartphone communication, the hypothesis is that the mediation of smartphone interfaces, or the fact that much information on these devices is typed and hence devoid of adequate contextual information, may make this interpretive decision harder or may demand increased effort when working out the intended interpretation.

Thirdly, an underlying hypothesis suggests that studying smartphone communication by focusing only on the interpretations and eventual relevance of the propositional information contained in the utterances exchanged between users appears as a seriously limited approach to this kind of communication. Therefore, the book argues for the importance of completing and complementing the cyberpragmatic study of smartphone communication with two terms: contextual constraint and non-propositional effect (see Chapter 3).

In a nutshell, contextual constraints may be defined as aspects which underlie smartphone acts of communication and users’ interactions (i.e. they exist prior to the act of communication) and determine their eventual (un)successful outcome. They frame, as it were, communication and have an impact both on the quality of interpretation and on the willingness to engage in future interactions. Non-propositional effects, in turn, refer to feelings, emotions or impressions which may or may not be overtly intended by the sender user, but which are nevertheless triggered by the act of smartphone communication. These add (positively or negatively) to the effects obtained from utterance interpretation (propositional content). The addition of these terms becomes essential if we want to understand why users interact to such an extent on their smartphones, why they shy away from oral interactions in physical settings, or why they resort to typed text even though more contextualised (and free) options, including phone and video calls, are available on the smartphone as well.

Finally, this book will also take into account the construction and management of the relevance-theoretic notion of mutual manifestness – closer to more traditional terms such as mutual knowledge and shared knowledge, albeit with a different cognitive approach. In short, this notion refers to the intersection of the interlocutors’ accessible information at a specific stage of the dialogue in which they are engaged (Sperber and Wilson 1995: 40). Speakers have to guess and predict not only the characteristics of their interlocutors’ accessible contextual information, but also which part of that information is shared (mutually manifest). Successful smartphone interactions are normally the ones where contextual information plays a major part in revealing the information that is mutual or shared by the interlocutors.

In sum, interlocutors often take for granted information to which neither of them has real access due to a lack of physical co-presence or miscalculated context accessibility in the addressee, and misunderstandings and miscommunication may consequently arise. The wrong assumptions of mutuality may be focused on the physical–virtual interface; by way of example, to assume that the other user has similar access to the information surrounding the “sender user” from their physical environment or from assumptions of usage codes involved in certain communicative strategies such as the use of emojis or text alteration.

Some more specific objectives of the book are:

• [1] To study how users manage their communicative strategies and intended interpretations through smartphone messaging apps (WhatsApp, Snap-chat, WeChat, Line, etc.).
• [2] To account for the implications of text alteration and the use of emojis when users inferentially fill the gap between what the other users type and what they really intend to communicate through messaging apps.
• [3] To provide a description of contextualisation as well as presumption of information mutuality in oral communication through the smartphone.
• [4] To assess the cyberpragmatic challenge posed by new narratives created on smartphones in terms of authorship, discourses, and varieties of readers.
• [5] To analyse the interpretive outcomes that arise from discourses such as text, image, video, (animated) stickers, and GIFs, together with their multimodal combinations.
• [6] To account for livestreaming on the smartphone, paying special attention to the portal Twitch.
• [7] To study the impact of the virtual–physical interface on how communication is managed, context is selected, and mutuality of information ...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgement
• 1 Introduction: the smartphone phenomenon
• Part I Pragmatics, cyberpragmatics, and smartphones
• Part II Smartphone-mediated discourse and communication
• Part III Media on the smartphone
• Part IV The interplay between the physical and the virtual
• References
• Index