Recognizing mutual ‘proximity’ at a distance: Weaving together mobility, sociality and technology

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Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 1924–1937 www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma

Recognizing mutual ‘proximity’ at a distance: Weaving together mobility, sociality and technology Christian Licoppe * Department of Social Science, Telecom ParisTech, Institut Telecom, 46 rue Barrault, 75013 Paris, France Received 15 February 2008; received in revised form 4 September 2008; accepted 16 September 2008

Abstract The aim of this paper is to analyse the way social gatherings are collaboratively accomplished in two highly different settings, routine mobile phone conversations, and a location-aware mobile game, through a single, sequentially ordered interactional device based on participants producing mutually ratified ‘co-proximity events’. It starts from their doing ‘co-localization work’, that is, collaboratively establishing their locations, which provides them with opportunities to assess their mutual locations as some form of proximity. I show how such ‘co-proximity events’ achieved within talk-in-interaction enact the relevance of a future face-to-face encounter, and project an invitation to meet as a relevant ‘next’ in the interactional sequence. In the location-aware system, the game infrastructure and interfaces assume agency in the discovery of co-proximity, by providing players with opportunities to see the presence of their icons on a single map. I show how players treat such a display as a form of mediated co-proximity, with the same interactional and sequential consequences as in mobile phone conversations. The sequence-sensitive interactional device I identify here allows the collaborative production of social encounters. It weaves mobility and sociality, proximity and hospitality, and can be argued to possess a wider anthropological significance. # 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Mobility; Proximity; Location awareness; Mobile phone

1. Introduction The way we manage the appearance and presence of others in our immediate environment was a focus of Goffman’s interactionist sociology, which emphasized the importance of the issues of access and social recognition involved in such an event (Goffman, 1963, 1971). Goffman and a few others stressed the relevance of spatial distance and the participants’ orientation to their mutual positions. Hall isolated four crucial distances that separate people in face-to-face communication, ranging from intimate to public distance, whose meanings may vary considerably from one culture to another (Hall, 1966). Kendon described how, as one participant in an informal setting gets nearer to another one, he or she combines multimodal resources such as gaze, gesture and speech to enter into conversation, in a way which is highly sensitive to the two individuals’ mutual spatial distance and witnessable form of mobility (Kendon, 1990). Ethnographic, interaction-oriented studies have also shown how, in many different settings, the achievement and recognition of ‘co-proximity’ through mutual sightings entails a state of ‘heightened accessibility’’ (Goffman, 1963), and performatively enacts the relevance of a future face-to-face encounter and focussed interaction. Two Tuaregs who * Tel.: +33 145818116; fax: +33 145659515. E-mail address: [email protected]. 0378-2166/$ – see front matter # 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2008.09.017

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suddenly discover one another across dunes as they ride camels in the Sahara desert provide a vivid illustration (Youssouf et al., 1976). Once they have seen one another (each knowing that the other is aware of him), a situation has emerged where a change of course to encounter the other becomes an option. Should they ignore the encounter that this (visual) experience of ‘co-proximity’ entails, or should they notice it and act upon it? In a culture marked by constant warfare and feuding, there is a strong expectation that both participants should adjust their paths so that they can meet. If one of the Tuaregs appears to try to elude such an encounter, the other is entitled to interpret that as a sign of enmity or treachery, presaging a potential ambush. Conversely, individuals may deliberately avoid recognizing mutual proximities, to escape the consequences of making more focussed interactions relevant. For instance, they may conspicuously absorb themselves in window-gazing to avoid exchanging a gaze with someone they know who is approaching (Sudnow, 1972), or, for strollers and would-be shoppers stopping and looking at the goods in a Chinese fruit market, avoid the seller’s gaze and ignore her questions (Orr, 2008). From a different point of view, John Urry has called for the development of a ‘sociology of mobility’ able to explain why distant persons travel (Urry, 2002), and to understand what may underlie our ‘compulsion of proximity’ (Boden and Molotch, 1994). Such issues are especially relevant in a world in which members have resources to interact from a distance, through an ever more sophisticated array of communication technologies (and prominently mobile technologies). The development of ‘connected presence’, in which social relationships are accomplished through a seamless web of frequent face-to-face encounters and variously mediated interactions at a distance, seems to be a characteristic feature of such a world (Licoppe, 2004; Licoppe and Smoreda, 2005). In the most extreme form of the management of social bonds through ‘connected presence’, any type of mediated contact is equivalent to any other. Face-to-face encounters, which are cumbersome to organize and time-consuming, would stand a good chance of disappearing. This is obviously not the case, and it is particularly important to understand how serendipitous opportunities for encounters may be practically accomplished within a web of communication-at-a-distance. The problem I want to discuss here opens within Urry’s mobility perspective that exploits the dynamics of distance and proximity, absence and presence, and ends where Kendon’s questions started: how may distant participants be able to create unplanned opportunities to meet, how do they manage their emergence, and how do they use references to their location, mutual positions and mobility as resources to accomplish that? More precisely, I want to show how the interactional performance of accomplishing mutual co-proximity from a distance (beyond the range of sight and speech, through the use of telecommunication resources) constitutes a potent device to project a focussed, face-to-face interaction as a relevant, emergent future course of joint action. Mutual recognition of co-proximity at a distance combines: (1) a spatio-temporal frame: being spatially close, with respect to a time frame relevant to the kind of mobility resources that both participants may reasonably expect to be available to them; (2) practical issues: the availability of both participants to common activities is usually analysed during the collaborative construction, noticing of and mentioning of co-proximity events; and (3) social concerns: formulations of location and activity are tailored and adjusted exactly to what the other participant may be expected to know and to need to know, so that they can display their understanding in the way they respond. Schegloff remarked that (landline) phone conversationalists usually did not refer explicitly to their potential copresence in a given place, and that when they did mention it, this might be a preliminary to encounters (Schegloff, 1972a:84–85). I want to develop that intuition and show, in the context of mobile phone conversations (in which participants are often unaware of the other’s location at the start of the call), how the collaborative work of mutual localization in which they may engage, can project a face-to-face encounter as a relevant next action in their ongoing interaction. More precisely, when that co-localization work is turned into an assessment of ‘co-proximity’, a potential face-to-face encounter is enacted as a relevant future course of action. It is put into play, and an invitation (or an offer, or a request, etc.) to meet is projected as a relevant next turn in the conversation. The co-proximity/face-to-face encounter interactional machinery couples mobility and sociality through talk-in-interaction. It is particularly relevant to mobile phone conversations, for such interactions may be turned into opportunities for participants to recognize their locations and constitute their occasional proximity as a salient and meaningful event. The project that underlies this research is to: (a) provide empirical evidence of the use of the particular interactional device that couples the performance of co-proximity events to face-to-face encounters as collaborative, emergent joint projects; (b) identify its sequential organization; (c) analyse its felicity conditions and the ways in which its pragmatic consequences are finely tuned to the ecologies in which the discovery of mutual co-proximity may occur. Because coproximity may be constructed between distant participants (beyond sighting or hearing distance), I think that such an interactional device is a key resource in a world in which members are enabled to interact from a distance through an

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ever more sophisticated array of communication technologies (and prominently mobile technologies). It is integral to a spatio-temporal heterogeneous ‘infrastructure of encounterability’ (Thrift, 2004) that extends way beyond the times and scenes of co-present interaction. Space and time are deeply interwoven with relational knowledge and shared histories; for a given pair of acquainted subjects, they are textured so that they may afford a sense of closeness (at a distance) that warrants more immediate contact, and the experience of which may be turned into a serendipitous opportunity for various forms of encounter and affiliation-building. Some recent technological systems which provide subjects with mutual location-awareness resources are particularly interesting because they afford new opportunities and formats for constituting co-proximity events. I will therefore shift the analysis towards a different setting, that of a location-aware community of Japanese players (Licoppe and Inada, 2006). The location-awareness mobile technology provides specific ‘affordances’ that encourage the construction of a particular type of ‘co-proximity event’, based on ‘on-screen co-presence’ (i.e. two players seeing their mutual locations on the screen of their mobile phone). In that case, co-proximity events are multimodal (and not just conversational) accomplishments, the agency of which is distributed through a complex heterogeneous sociotechnical assemblage. However, I will show that players actually turn such opportunities into ‘co-proximity events’ and are sensitive to the way they performatively enact a face-to-face encounter as a relevant, emergent, future joint project, within a formally similar sequential organization of their text message interchange. If the co-proximity events/ face-to-face encounter interactional device is also operative here, its detailed pragmatic consequences are highly sensitive to social and cultural features of the management of encounters and relations in public in such a locationaware setting. 2. Accomplishing mutual co-proximity and projecting face-to-face encounters in mobile phone conversations 2.1. Analysis of a mobile conversation This research is based on a corpus of 400 mobile conversations with 21 mobile phone users, gathered over a period of 3 months. Studies of mobile phone conversations have shown that, contrary to standard assumptions about mobile phone conversations, the use of localization queries (of the ‘where are you?’ type) are not a constant feature of mobile phone conversations, and that users often rely on activity-related queries (Weilenmann and Leuchovius, 2004). When localization queries are actually used, this may be attributed to the fact that location bears a special relevance with respect to what is at play within the conversation at that moment (Arminen, 2006). The conversation analysed below provides a typical example of the way localization queries may be used to constitute mutual co-proximity as a noticeable feature of the interactional setting, and how this brings the possibility of an encounter into play. Excerpt 1 1. A: 2.

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(0.9) ouais (.) alloˆ? (0.9) yes (.) hello? (0.2) salut e´line (.) c’est martin (0.1) touriste a` paris huit (0.2) hi eline (.) this is martin (0.1) a tourist in paris eight hein:::? uh:::? (1.1) pardon? uh:::? (1.1) pardon? je dis martin I said martin (0.9) ah:: martin: (.) ouais:: (.) c¸a va? ah:: martin: (.) yeah (.) you okay? touriste a` paris huit (.) et occa[sionnellement tourist in paris eight (.) and occa[sionnally

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[ouais:::: touriste de chez touriste [tourist for sure (0.5) tu es dans le secteur? Are you around here? ah:::::: mais c¸a (.) ah:: d’accord (.) ah be´h j’comprends (.) oh:::::: but this (.) oh:: okay (.) oh yeah I understand (.) >parce que l’autre fois j’ai eu un appel< >because last time I had a call<

Greetings and recognition are accomplished smoothly and quickly in the first two turns. In turn 2, after identifying himself, the caller provides further details on his identity, ‘tourist in Paris 8’ that makes the issue of localization potentially relevant (Paris eight refers to the campus of one of the universities in Paris). This ‘formulation of place’ seemingly refers to a well-known landmark (Schegloff, 1972a). However, since the participants are familiar with each other and often meet at the university, and because this formulation follows a slightly self-deprecating characterization of the caller’s involvement, it also points towards a possible treatment of such a formulation as membership-oriented. This ‘self-localization’ turn is not immediately responded to. The answerer first signals a problem of understanding which is treated by the caller as a mere recognition problem, thus leading to a standard repair sequence (lines 3–8). The success of the repair sequence prompts the caller to repeat and slightly elaborate on his initial self-definition (line 9), to which his interlocutor responds by jokingly emphasizing the initial characterization (‘tourist’) and ignoring the possible self-localization embedded in the turn (line 10). This prompts the caller to address a direct localization query to her in line 12 (‘are you around here’?). He thus shows that in his initial formulation the localization was (and still is) relevant to the ongoing conversation (and in a sense he repairs her previous treatment of it). These two are intimate friends, and his turn displays that intimacy by showing entitlement to ask about her whereabouts, which reveals expectations about what these whereabouts could be. Moreover, since this localization query occupies a possible slot for providing the reason for the call, it marks the caller’s special interest in the recipient’s localization, and his possible prospecting of the potentialities of the situation with respect to an encounter. It is interesting from a conversational perspective to analyse in more detail the way in which this is done and responded to. The localization query in turn 12 still has the indexical form ‘are you around here?’. It orients the ongoing conversation in a subtle and economic way towards: (i) the relevance of collaborative mutual localization relative to a familiar place (the campus of the Paris VIII university); (ii) the relevance of their possible co-presence on the campus; (iii) providing an opportunity for the answerer to display his availability for the type of activity for which that particular sort of ‘co-presence’ is meaningful, primarily those involving a face-to-face encounter. Since no precise activity is referred to, the face-to-face encounter appears as an end in itself, a significant enough, autonomous motive, and not just a means towards another end (as in meeting for some reason); (iv) an orientation towards the practical arrangements that might enable a face-to-face encounter. Compared to an open localization query (of the ‘where are you’ type), an indexical query such as ‘are you around’ anticipates a form of co-proximity. It also embeds a temporal framing and a ‘mobility analysis’: considering the common stock of knowledge of the participants relative to the way they inhabit that particular place and their likely situation of co-presence on the campus, a face-to-face encounter could be practically arranged within minutes. The caller does not immediately answer the question. Instead she initiates another recognition-repair sequence which indicates that her initial recognition problem concerned not the caller but the number displayed on her phone (which was not the caller’s usual number, because of the particular way these data were collected).1 1 To gather the recordings, the participants in the sample agreed to call the number of a recording platform first, and then to dial the number of their correspondents after being connected to that platform. On the answerers’ mobile phone the number of the platform was displayed, not the caller’s usual number. This led both to repair sequences, and to routine awareness of the call being recorded when it proceeded that way.

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The closing of that second repair sequence provides a slot for the caller to repeat his localization query, which he phrases in almost exactly the same terms (as shown in line 23, extract 2) and places after the mutually ratified exhaustion of a prior topic (lines 22, 23). Such a repeat question makes salient the fact that the initial query has not been treated properly. It shows the caller’s commitment to obtaining an answer and gives the ongoing talk-ininteraction the organization of an unfolding summons sequence (Schegloff, 1972b). Excerpt 2 22. A: c’e´tait toi:: petit coquin::= so it was you:: naughty boy 23. B: >voila` voila` voila`.< (.) tu es dans le coin? >well well well< (.) are you around? 24. A: (0.7) ouais:: je suis dans le coin: (0.1) mais la` je vais (0.7) yeah:: I am around but now ‘‘I’m going to 25. A: a` un cours de Page`s:= a lesson by Page`s 26. B: ah::::::. >tre`s bien tre`s bien tre`s bien< (.) tre`s bien ah:::::: >okay, okay, okay (.) okay The answerer marks a significant pause (line 24), and then agrees in the same terms (‘yeah:: I am around’). This ratifies her co-presence on the campus. Because of the exact alignment of their indexical formulation of location, it also does more, in asserting a form of potentially consequential proximity. Such an alignment provides an efficient conversational device to turn co-location work into collaborative ratification of mutual co-proximity. After another pause the answerer goes on to provide an account of what she is doing right then, prefaced by a ‘but’ which turns it into a kind of apology (lines 24, 25). She thus accounts for their not being able to meet because she is not available, thereby treating their co-location work and the constitution of their ‘co-proximity’ as a noticeable matter-offact that normatively projects an encounter as a possible follow-up. She displays her anticipation that the relevant next conversational action of the caller would be a proposal, an invitation, an offer, a request, etc. about a face-to-face encounter, by providing an excuse for being unable to do so. She, therefore, treats the preceding co-location work that turned into an assertion of mutual co-proximity as a pre-sequence (Levinson, 1983), with respect to some form of proposal to meet. Moreover, the significant pause that precedes her turn may also be interpreted as marking a dispreferred response (Pomerantz, 1984), that of refusing this expected yet unformulated proposal to meet. The caller simply acknowledges her excuse and the phone conversation moves on to other topics. After closing a discussion of her forthcoming exams, the answerer re-initiates the co-location work with a new query (line 43 in extract 3). She produces a two-part query asking for the caller’s location, followed by a proposed answer concerning a specific building on the campus. Rather than indexical references to mutual presence in a familiar domain, the location work now relies on explicit references to commonly known places on the campus. Excerpt 3 41. B: 8bon.8 8well.8 42. (1.1) 43. A: t’es ou` la` toi? (.) baˆtiment c? where are you? (.) building c? 44. B: je suis de (0.1) je suis devant la coupole ouais I’m in/(0.1)I’m in front of the cupola yeah 45. (0.5) 46. A: >ah::: devant la coupole< (.) >okay.< (.) >bah je suis pas loin< (.) >bah >ah::: in front of the cupola< (.) >okay< >well, ‘‘I’m not far< (.) > bah 47. A: > j’vais passer::: < (.) j’te fais un petit bonjour quand meˆme > I’ll come over:::< (.) I ‘ll say a quick hello to you at least 48. B: okay (.) a` tout d’suite hhh.= okay (.) see you right now hhh.=

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49. 50. 51.

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A: at (.) a` tout d’suite (.) oui::: (.) salut ss (.) see you right now (.) yes::: (.) bye B: 8salut:::8 8bye:::8

The caller answers by localizing himself with respect to a particular section of the building. By saying that he is in front of a part of the building he is accomplishing an ‘intrinsic reference’ (Levinson, 2003) that makes available his position relative to known features of a landmark. A simple acknowledgement (of the type ‘yes I am at building c’) facilitates practical arrangements and guiding sequences (Schegloff, 1972a). In this particular conversational setting, this provides practical information that would be useful to the organization of the encounter which was made relevant as a joint project, but previously rejected. By providing a clear answer to the initial query the caller also shows that he is prepared to collaborate in the localization work initiated by the answerer. The answerer goes on to produce a composite turn (lines 46, 47) that neatly summarizes many features of the sequential organization which emerges from our analysis, and shows how participants orient towards it to make sense of the unfolding sequence:  She starts by repeating and acknowledging the localization proposed by the caller. She does not state her own location. Since some co-localization work had already been performed earlier in the conversation, the caller may assume that the proposed localization is relevant to her own location and practical concerns.  She then provides a direct assessment of their mutual co-proximity (direct in the sense that she does not first localize herself): ‘well, I’m not far’. She thus states their co-proximity in an explicit way. This is made relevant both by the fact that the localization work is accomplished here with respect to landmarks rather than through indexical references to a common zone of possible co-presence, and because she does not provide a location for herself so that the other participant might judge for himself the consequentiality of their relative positions.  She then does not invite the caller but plainly announces that she will join him at the place he indicated. Since the possibility of an encounter and his commitment to it as a desirable joint project had already been enacted earlier, an invitation would not perform any significant interactional work at this stage, within the performative field that the relevance of the co-proximity/face-to-face encounter creates.  She eventually frames the face-to-face encounter temporally, as a necessarily short one (she has a lesson afterwards), and interactionally (not to accomplish any specific activity but just to say hello). This framing is presented as a compromise between her unavailability and a kind of obligation that had not been met when she declined the invitation through the use of the locution (‘at least’). In a sense, proposing a short encounter displays her will to respect that sense of obligation within her activity constraints. 2.2. Co-location work and the accomplishment of co-proximity as a significant event for the ongoing conversation The analysis of the previous conversation and several others in our corpus suggests the existence of a type of sequence in mobile conversations that projects unplanned face-to-face encounters as occasioned by the participants’ collaborative recognition of their mutual locations as proximate. The canonical organization of such sequences involves the following steps: 1. The collaborative co-location of the participants, which may be accomplished in different manners according to various contingencies in the relevant talk-in-interaction (combining for example self-localization and localization queries in different positions and order). 2. Such co-location work may be treated by the participants as an opportunity to discover and ‘ratify’ a form of spatial proximity. The formulation of such proximity makes relevant a ‘locational analysis’ (stating mutual positions and allowing a judgement about mutual positions and distance as relevant to the ongoing interaction), a ‘mobility analysis’ (according to what the individuals know or may infer from the situation about their mobility resources, they can anticipate that a face-to-face encounter in a given time frame may constitute a feasible practical accomplishment), and an ‘activity analysis’ (to determine that ongoing activities allow for the realization of such a project and the ways in which the potential encounter may be properly framed).

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3. The assessment of mutual positions as an instance of mutual proximity, and therefore as an event that is both noticeable and expected to be noticed. This may be accomplished in different ways: (a) implicitly through the use of indexical formulations in the co-location work, of the type ‘are you around? yes I am around’. In this case accomplishing co-location and ‘doing co-proximity’ cannot be separated. The use of such formulations directly aligns both participants on the spatio-temporal plane but also with respect to a potential encounter as an emergent joint project; (b) through an explicit assessment (of the ‘i am not far’ or ‘we are close’ type). This is usually the case when, during the co-location work, the participants have positioned themselves with respect to known landmarks. In that case the co-location work and the co-proximity assessment are performed separately. 4. The acknowledgement by the other participant of the proposed co-proximity assessment enacts and makes relevant here and now a possible face-to-face encounter to be accomplished in a near future on the basis of the contingencies of the ratified co-proximity. Because of the collaborative nature of the interactional work that leads to the mutual recognition of co-proximity, the face-to-face encounter appears as an emergent joint project. 5. With respect to the sequential organization of talk-in-interaction, the participants’ collaborative recognition of their mutual proximity and of its status as a significant event for the ongoing interaction, projects an invitation, an offer, a request, etc. to meet face to face as a relevant next turn. Such invitations are usually performed in an indirect way (of the type ‘would you like us to meet . . .’), which checks the recipient’s commitment to such a project and allows him or her, in his or her answer, to separate issues of affiliation and commitment to the emergent project from practical concerns (Conein, 2005). Issues of entitlement and membership are relevant at all stages. Entitlement is displayed and accomplished when asking for location and for a face-to-face encounter. Some degree of familiarity and mutual knowledge underlies the various analyses that the participants may perform with respect to the relevance and feasibility of a future encounter. It is important to note also how such an interactional device acts as a generic way to produce encounters. It does not require a specific purpose for the encounter to be mentioned (though that may happen), nor is it necessary that one of the participants be oriented towards an encounter as in this case: unplanned face-to-face encounters may be collaboratively produced as an end in themselves, and not just be treated as a means towards another end. Looking back at a French corpus of landline phone conversations in the 1980s, one can see many instances of an interactional device that projects unplanned encounters as a relevant future action (Conein, 1988). The caller typically inquires about the called party’s availability, in a sequential position compatible with displaying a reason for the call, of the type ‘what are you doing?’. In this case the answerer displays his or her availability by indicating that he or she is not doing anything worth mentioning. This is treated as a pre-sequence that makes an invitation to meet relevant. It is usually treated in the literature as the canonical example of pre-sequences. In his classic textbook, Levinson characteristically introduces his analysis of pre-sequences with the example: ‘A: what are you doing? B: Nothing A: Do you want to have a drink?’ (Levinson, 1983). In the perspective of this paper, these are not only paradigmatic cases of pre-sequence in general, but also a particular kind of pre-invitation that projects an unplanned meeting at the horizon of the interaction. It is therefore an interactional device which bears some family resemblance with the one I am discussing here, and which is highly relevant to landline phone conversations where the caller usually knows where the answerer is (and the answerer expects the caller to know). It works by providing participants with an opportunity to collaboratively recognize their mutual availability. It is not fully symmetrical in the sense that the caller does not have to state his or her own availability, for it will be implied, as will his or her potential commitment in the emergent project of an encounter. The recognition of mutual co-proximity is a rare accomplishment in landline phone conversations. One example Schegloff mentions incidentally involves two participants ‘discovering’ the presence of a third participant in the same town. On the other hand, mobile phone conversations make collaborative references to mutual location relevant, and provide opportunities to turn that awareness into the recognition and even the ‘discovery’ of co-proximity. Authors have tried to assess the specificity of mobile phone conversations with respect to organizing activities and social coordination, on the one hand (Ling and Yttri, 2002), and, in a somewhat controversial manner, to the sequential organization of talk-in-interaction, on the other (Hutchby and Barnett, 2005; Arminen, 2005). Ling and Yttri have stressed the importance of mobile phones with micro-coordination, including the endogenous production of face-toface encounters. This study shows how such propositions need to be qualified and documented with empirical studies. It is clearly the case that unplanned encounters are produced as much in landline phone conversations as in mobile

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phone conversations. What differs may be the nature of the sequentially organized devices that allow such a joint project to emerge from interaction at a distance, and the relevance of their use in a given setting: (a) checking the other participant’s availability in a landline phone conversation unfolds as a canonical pre-sequence; and (b) recognizing mutual proximity in mobile phone conversations, and constituting it as a salient and meaningful event whose verbal recognition and ratification acts as a pre-invitation. It is also important to note that both types of sequence project the relevance of next actions on a larger time frame, such as face-to-face encounters to be accomplished later and beyond the ongoing phone conversation. The particularities of landline phone conversations and mobile phone conversation with respect to the production of encounters lie not at the level of the turn-by-turn organization of sequences, but in the respective relevance of different larger scale interactional devices, that is, ‘checking availability’ and ‘recognizing ‘mutual co-proximity’’. I will now focus on the latter, and show how it may constitute a resource to interpret some encounter-oriented interactions in a mobile location-aware community. While in mobile phone conversations the recognition of coproximity is a pure conversational accomplishment, often between well-acquainted participants with extensive prior knowledge, anticipations and rights of access to the other’s whereabouts, I will show how, in this different setting, it interweaves visual displays and conversation and becomes a multimodal achievement. It is distributed between vision and talk-in-interaction, people and artefacts, and allows the mutual visual ‘discovery’ of co-proximity between participants with all degrees of prior acquaintance. 3. ‘Discovering’ co-proximity in a location-aware community 3.1. Location awareness and the construction of noticeable ‘onscreen co-presence’ events between Mogi players The game Mogi was developed by French game designers and commercialized in 2003 in Japan by KDDI. The gameplay consists in collecting virtual objects with a GPS, 2G or 3G mobile phone. Such items are ‘localized’ (in the sense that users can act on them only when they are close to their virtual position) and are continuously created and renewed by the game designers. Each object belongs to a collection. Completing a collection earns points, and players are classified according to the points accumulated. The basic idea is to create a community of high-tech huntergatherers whose activity is set in an economy based on the bartering of virtual objects and a sociability based on text messaging. In the 2004–2005 period, at the time of our study, the game had about one thousand users. There were about as many male as female players, and a large proportion of the players were adults in the 25–45 age-group. The 2year empirical study draws on the analysis of an anonymized corpus of mobile messages exchanged between the players, and in-depth interviews with some active players. The game may also be played through a Website, on which maps of the gameplay at all scales are available for all of Japan. The idea is to enable fixed Web-based players to monitor the gameplay and guide mobile players towards items. Locations are therefore public within the community of players. Players bear in mind the fact that their locations may be noticed and commented on by other players at any moment. The key feature of the game with respect to this study is the mobile phone interface called the ‘radar’, which features a map with a 1 km side, displayed on the players’ mobile phones (Fig. 1). This map represents each player’s game environment, with his or her pictogram at the centre of the mobile screen, surrounded by those of the other players and virtual objects situated within the 1 km radius, with a precision of a few metres when in GPS mode.2 The ‘closest Mogi-friend’ is also indicated at the bottom of the screen, with the distance even if it is more than 1 km. This functionality was added by the designers to facilitate the ‘onscreen encounters’. These data are updated each time the player reloads the map or does a request that modifies elements on the map. Fig. 1 provides an example of a particular situation in which a player has connected to the game, visualizes the radar, and two players appear on the screen. This provides an opportunity for players to visually discover their relative positions. At these distances, meeting one another may be achieved rapidly, within minutes. Such a visual display of on-screen co-presence may therefore be treated as a kind of ‘co-proximity event’, entailing the practical feasibility of an encounter. Co-proximity events appear here as distributed, multimodal achievements that interweave visual iconic displays on the mobile phone and the text messages exchanged by the players in which such events are referred to. I want to show how the same interactional device is again operative in this very different socio-technical assemblage and 2

Precision is a complex issue that also depends on whether the GPS mobile phone of the player is ‘seen’ by one or more satellites.

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Fig. 1. A typical configuration for the radar interface.

cultural setting, that is, how the construction of ‘co-proximity events’ projects the relevance of a face-to-face encounter. The players are scattered throughout Japan but a fraction of them live or work in dense conurbations such as Tokyo. For them, having another player present on the mobile screen is an event which is common enough (it may happen several times a day, and at least several times a week for very active players). A first question is whether participants who are co-present on screen notice and mention that occurrence or not. Ignoring it may be interactionally consequential since the other player may also notice the same event (a fact any participant can never be fully certain about). Hence, ignoring an on-screen co-presence (by not mentioning it in a text message) may be treated as an absence of response and a refusal to grant social recognition. Like Targui riders seeing each other across dunes, Mogi players that see each other on screen are in a state of ‘heightened accessibility’ (Goffman, 1963) in which the accomplishment of face-to-face focussed interaction is a relevant and salient issue. Players have developed several ways of dealing socially with on-screen co-presence events. If these occur with unknown players (Mogi players are very concerned that this will be the case if the success of the game and the size of their community grow), they are entitled not to notice. An exception is when onscreen co-presence occurs between an expert player and an unknown novice player (which the expert player may realize by checking the other’s profile). A culturally evolved local expectation within the community of players requires that the expert take the initiative of remarking the novice’s onscreen co-presence by text messages, and of giving her or him a virtual item. When onscreen co-presence occurs between players who have been interacting on a regular basis through the game, or belong to the same team, it is again expected to be noticed and remarked upon (probably reinforced by the fact that that co-presence may also be noticed by a Web-based third party). Such an expectation is displayed in the following interaction in which a player mentions to another player that he saw him on the screen a few days earlier, and apologizes for not taking that opportunity to get in touch at the time: ‘‘Hello Master. It seems we were close to each other the other day. But I noticed only much later and I wasn’t able to confirm. Where were you? Enjoy your work today, like other days’’. A player may be accountable for not taking notice and granting social recognition in cases of onscreen co-presence. Some other culturally evolved rules may pertain to the propriety of face-to-face encounters within the Mogi community. Most of the members, and particularly female players, say they prefer to avoid meeting other players face-to-face, and tend to ignore invitations to do so. These expectations and their underlying inferences are cultural in the sense that they imbue each onscreen co-presence event (and more generally each form of encounter and interaction between players) with the capacity to be treated as an opportunity to enact the roles, values and cultural ethos of the players as situated accomplishments. My aim is now to understand how such forms of mutual presence on screen are actually treated by participants.

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3.2. The construction and management of co-proximity events by Mogi players The following text message typically starts by a direct reference by player A to the location of B, relative to his own location, and an assessment of their situation as one of potential co-proximity:

The lack of initial greetings and the surprised smiley construct the turn as a response to a previous action, that is, the perception of their co-presence on the mobile phone. The noticing is done in a way that combines cognitive (recognizing onscreen co-presence) and social issues (on screen co-presence as an event which it is proper to mention and to constitute as a relevant feature of the ongoing interactional setting). The second player responds by acknowledging the onscreen co-presence (she thus legitimizes the other player’s noticing of the event) and aligns with the co-proximity assessment. In this way both players have turned their mutual sighting onscreen into a shared and mutually acknowledged noticeable co-proximity event, relevant to an ongoing interaction. Such openings are commonplace in the corpus and appear as a conventional way to take notice of mutual onscreen copresence. They have all the features that linguistic anthropology has ascribed to greetings (Duranti, 1997). Their specificity with respect to traditional greetings in co-present encounters rests on their reference to the particularities of a mediated onscreen ‘encounter’. After this conventional opening, participants have not only greeted one another, they have also established their situation as a meaningful form of co-proximity. With respect to the interactional device I have identified, they have constructed a mutually shared and ratified co-proximity event, which is also a salient feature of their interaction. The difference lies in the fact that what was a purely conversational accomplishment in mobile phone conversations, is now a heterogeneous and multimodal socio-technical assemblage, in which location-awareness, mobile screens and the size of the map of the radar interface are all active in the constitution of co-proximity as a relevant interactional feature. Does it still entail the projection of the face-to-face encounter as a horizon to the ongoing text message interaction?

After about 2 min, player A sends a new message stating that she has run away (turn 3). Since they are not in visual contact, this message necessarily refers to the fact that she has disappeared from his screen. He accompanies his noticing of the end of their co-proximity with repeated markers of disappointment, thus making it retrospectively remarkable that such a course of action does not meet his expectation that the co-proximity should have lasted, and therefore should have developed into a kind of activity for which co-proximity is relevant. She responds (turn 4) by accounting for her disappearing from his screen on the basis of her current mobility (she took another subway line). By doing so she legitimizes his expectation that their initial co-proximity, made interactionally relevant, was projecting some expectable potential course of action. She then reverts to this issue several turns later (turn 8) where, after a repair sequence, she provides a more general account of her behaviour.

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Turn 8 is proffered as a general maxim that one wishes to run away when one gets very close, and therefore evade the potential consequences of co-proximity. Such a desire to escape is said to be stronger when players are closer. All this is consistent with the notion that the inter-subjective constitution and acknowledgement of co-proximity enacts the possibility of a face-to-face encounter and that the force of that performative multimodal achievement increases with the degree of co-proximity. She adds a more circumstantial justification, based on the fact that she has experienced many such onscreen ‘encounters’ that day: frequency is hinted at as mitigating the force of the co-proximity event. It provides another reason to ignore such events or to avoid acting upon them. The situated use of such a gloss on the pragmatic consequences of co-proximity (the various actions that may constitute proper responses) mutually constitutes the participants as members of the community of players, with repeated experience of the Mogi lifeworld. The entire interaction makes sense with respect to the sequences organized around the construction and ratification of mutual co-proximity which were identified in Section 1. Its organization and the actions it performs and projects bears some degree of formal similarity with the mobile phone conversation case I analysed: collaborative construction and acknowledgement of mutual co-proximity, followed by excuses showing retrospectively how such an accomplishment projected a future encounter as a proper consequence. The next sequence opens with the participants ‘discovering’ co-proximity and constituting it as a meaningful and relevant event through a similar two-turn conventional sequence of the type ‘‘We are close. Yes we are close’’.

A first difference is that in his answer, player D evokes a surprising degree of closeness (by elaborating on C’s turn (‘very close’ instead of ‘close’) and by using an emoticon expressing surprise. He then continues in the same message

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by remarking that he might have seen her. We may understand this as a departure from the canonical treatment of coproximity. At that sequential point, a proposal by the first speaker to meet would be in order. Instead, the male player suggests that they are already at mutual sighting distance, but in an unregulated, asymmetrical, unsanctioned configuration: he might be able to see her without her knowing about it. This leads to several turns in which the potential consequences of such a situation are considered (turns 3–9):

Her confirmatory question in turn 3 (‘You saw me’) which projects a yes or no answer is treated by him in a conspicuously evasive way (the laugh in turn 4). He then feigns being surprised by something he might have seen (turn 6) and inquires about the emotions that the situation might arouse in her. This entire sequence plays on the potential asymmetry of the situation and the power it gives him in evading standard courses of action (not answering her yes/no question) or as a right to enter her ‘information preserve’ (Goffman, 1971) by inquiring about her intimate emotions. Turn 10 ends in a way that is very significant with respect to my analysis, since it is an indirect invitation (‘do you want us to meet’), which is declined with an excuse in turn 11 (thereby legitimizing the preceding invitation). Considering the organization of the co-proximity/encounter interactional device, an invitation at that point appears delayed, since it would have been relevant at turns 2 or 3. In that position, it can be interpreted as him reverting to a standard sequential organization, retrospectively framing turn 3–9 as an inserted playful and transgressive sequence. It also appears as a

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kind of remedial interaction (Goffman, 1971) that re-establishes a symmetrical footing of both participants with respect to the relevance of an encounter. Such an accomplishment is meaningful only with the standard organization of the co-proximity/encounter interactional sequences as an interpretive background. Both cases discussed here therefore show how Mogi players, though operating within a distinct socio-technical context and lifeworld, orient as much as mobile phone conversationalists do towards the construction of co-proximity events and the management of their possible consequences with respect to face-to-face encounters. 4. Concluding remarks This paper has analysed how distant participants can comment on their locations, discuss them, and occasionally recognize, ‘discover’ and formulate their mutual positions as a form of co-proximity. Such a performance achieves ‘co-proximity events’, so that issues related to proximity are rendered salient in the ongoing interaction. ‘Doing coproximity’ is a potent performative accomplishment. First it enacts a future face-to-face encounter as a potential follow-up to the ongoing conversation, and makes such a possibility immediately relevant to the ongoing talk-ininteraction. The experienced present in the situation is enlarged to incorporate a future face-to-face encounter, beyond the turn-by-turn management of the unfolding interaction. Second, as regards the local, sequential management of conversation, it makes relevant a particular type of next action, such as an invitation or a request (to meet). The practical modalities of such an encounter are framed by the situated and contingent formulation produced during the three-step interactional work (co-location, assessment of mutual positions as co-proximity, proposition to meet), which is shaped so as to allow the participants to do ‘location analysis’, ‘mobility analysis’, ‘activity analysis’ and ‘membership analysis’. The emergence of the face-to-face encounter as a relevant joint project is a performative consequence of the achievement of co-proximity events. Such a collaborative performance creates a normative expectation with respect to a meeting to come. Once co-proximity has been ‘discovered’, mutually sanctioned and made salient in the ongoing talk-in-interaction, the fact that it is not followed by an invitation to meet (and/or practical arrangements to meet) is an opportunity for apologies and justifications. Ignoring the consequentiality of a mutually ‘discovered’ co-proximity may be interpreted as a way to refuse social recognition to the other party. I have shown the relevance and consequentiality of the interactional work of ‘discovering’ co-proximity in two different settings: ordinary mobile phone conversations in France and a location-aware mobile community of Japanese players. In the first setting, the work of constructing co-proximity events and managing their consequences is purely conversational, so that the standard organization of such sequences could be isolated and described. The understanding gained in the conversation analysis part has allowed me to analyse a second setting, and to show how location-aware Japanese Mogi players also oriented to that interactional device to manage some setting-specific situations such as ‘onscreen co-presence’ by treating them as ‘co-proximity events’. For them, the construction of co-proximity events is multimodal and distributed between the location-awareness infrastructure (and the visual displays it provides) and the interactions between players (through mobile text messaging). More generally, I have suggested how my analysis may encompass Tuareg nomads in the desert, mobile phone users in Paris, and location-aware Mogi players in Tokyo. It suggests that the interactional construction of co-proximity events and their consequentiality with respect to the emergence of a face-to-face encounter as a joint project bear a more general anthropological relevance, though the socio-technical assemblages that their performance relies on are very different. It is a key resource that links mobility and sociality across different times and cultures. What perspective does an understanding of such sequences and their interactional consequences allow us to develop with regard to mobile communication technology in action? Mobile communication technologies rely on communication devices that users carry with them. They therefore afford users with extended opportunities to do colocation work and to perform shared ‘co-proximity events’ between distant participants. Because the focus of such interactional work is on location and mutual positioning, it enables the emergence of situated identities for the participants, in which their mobility and their being ‘on the move’ are salient features. ‘Doing co-proximity’ performs participants as mobile entities, able to exploit local and contingent resources to allow for the projection of co-present sociality from a distance. It participates in the general turn that makes mobility less of a means towards an end and more of a social and cultural performance in its own right (Sheller and Urry, 2006). Location-awareness of the Mogi type extends and amplifies the possibility of ‘traffic encounters’ with unknown strangers that becomes relevant when participants are well beyond range of direct speech and sight, so that if we take a definition of the city as the kind of place where we experience a continuous flow of opportunities to encounter strangers (Lofland, 1973), ‘doing co-

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proximity’ and putting into play a face-to-face encounter unhinges urban experiences from their anchorage in the city as a ‘geographical’ space. Acknowledgements I wish to thank Julien Morel and Yoriko Inada for many fruitful discussions. Part of this research as been funded by a research contract with OrangeLabs, and I am grateful to Vale´rie Beaudouin, Fre´de´rique Legrand and Dominique Cardon for their support. References Arminen, Ilkka, 2005. Sequential order and sequence structure. The case of incommensurable studies on mobile phone calls. Discourse Studies 7 (6), 649–662. Arminen, Ilkka, 2006. Social functions of location in mobile telephony. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 10 (5), 319–323. Boden, Deirdre, Molotch, Harvey, 1994. The compulsion of proximity. In: Friedland, Roger, Boden, Deirdre (Eds.), NowHere. University of California Press, Berkeley, pp. 257–286. Conein, Bernard, 1988. De quelques formes de l’interaction dans la conversation te´le´phonique. Re´seaux 29, 9–32. Conein, Bernard, 2005. Les Sens Sociaux. Trois Essais de Sociologie Cognitive. Economica, Paris. Duranti, Alessandro, 1997. Universal and culture-specific properties of greetings. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 7 (1), 63–97. Goffman, Erving, 1963. Behavior in Public Places. The Free Press, New York. Goffman, Erving, 1971. Relations in Public. Microstructure of the Public Order. Harper & Row, New York. Hall, Edward T., 1966. The Hidden Dimension. Doubleday, Garden City. Hutchby, Ian, Barnett, Simone, 2005. Aspects of the sequential organization of mobile phone conversation. Discourse Studies 7 (2), 147–171. Kendon, Adam, 1990. Conducting Interaction. Patterns of Behavior in Focused Encounters. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Levinson, Stephen, 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Levinson, Stephen, 2003. Space in Language and Cognition. Explorations in Cognitive Diversity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Licoppe, Christian, 2004. Connected presence: the emergence of a new repertoire for managing social relationships in a changing communication technoscape. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22 (1), 135–156. Licoppe, Christian, Smoreda, Zbigniew, 2005. Are social networks technologically embedded? How networks are changing today with communication technologies. Social Networks 27 (4), 317–335. Licoppe, Christian, Inada, Yoriko, 2006. Emergent uses of a location aware multiplayer game: the interactional consequences of mediated encounters. Mobilities 1 (1), 39–61. Ling, Richard, Yttri, Birgitte, 2002. Hyper-coordination via mobile phones in Norway. In: Katz, James E., Aakhus, Mark (Eds.), Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 139–169. Lofland, Lyn, 1973. A World of Strangers. Order and Action in Urban Public Space. Waveland Press, Prospect Heights. Orr, Winnie, 2008. ‘Prospecting an encounter’ as a communicative event. Discourse Studies 10 (1), 317–339. Pomerantz, Anita, 1984. Agreeing and disagreeing with assessments: some features of preferred/dispreferred turn shapes. In: Atkinson, J.M., Heritage, J. (Eds.), Structures of Social Action. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 57–101. Schegloff, Emmanuel, 1972a. Notes on a conversational practice: formulating place. In: Sudnow, D. (Ed.), Studies in Social Interaction. The Free Press, New York, pp. 75–119. Schegloff, Emmanuel, 1972b. Sequencing in conversational openings. Directions in sociolinguistics. In: Hymes, D., Gumperz, J. (Eds.), The Ethnography of Communication. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 346–380. Sheller, Mimi, Urry, John, 2006. The new mobilities paradigm. Environment and Planning A 38 (2), 207–226. Sudnow, David, 1972. Temporal parameters of interpersonal observation. In: Sudnow, David (Ed.), Studies in Social Interaction. Free Press, New York, pp. 259–279. Thrift, Nigel, 2004. Remembering the technological unconscious by foregrounding knowledges of position. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22 (1), 175–190. Urry, John, 2002. Mobility and proximity. Sociology 36 (2), 255–274. Weilenmann, Alexandra, Leuchovius, Peter, 2004. I’m waiting where we met last time: exploring everyday positioning practices to inform design. In: Proceedings of NordiChi. Helsinki pp. 33–42. Youssouf, Ibrahim Ag, Grimshaw, Allen, Bird, Charles, 1976. Greetings in the desert. American Ethnologist 3, 797–824. Christian Licoppe, Ph.D., has been trained in History and Sociology of Science and Technology. After being head of Social Science Research at France Telecom OrangeLabs, he is currently professor of Sociology at Telecom Paristech. His research interests deal with the study of interaction in technology-mediated activity settings.