Katherine Mannell

Katherine Mannell, ‘Young Adults, Mobile Messaging, and the Negotiation of (Un)Availability’ (PhD, History & Philosophy of Science, 2020)

With a mobile phone, a person can reach and be reached anytime, anywhere. As many scholars have noted, this creates mutual expectations of availability, particularly among young adults whose friendships typically involve high rates of mobile messaging. What happens, however, in the moments when young adults do not want to be available, or cannot be available, to their friends? How do they resist this logic of constant availability in order to make space for themselves or to attend to other tasks or priorities? This thesis engages with these questions by investigating how young adults negotiate unavailability in a contemporary mobile environment.

In doing so, this thesis draws on interviews with 39 young adults and a historical comparison of availability etiquettes. The semi-structured interviews focus on young adults’ perceptions and experiences of mobile communication, namely, mobile messaging. Messaging is of particular relevance to the negotiation of unavailability because it is less disruptive to a person’s physical surroundings than calling and is thus often subject to higher expectations of responsiveness. It is also heavily used in many young adults’ friendships. In this context, negotiating unavailability is both particularly necessary and particularly challenging.

On the basis of participants’ accounts, this thesis argues that young adults use the affordances of mobile devices and messaging apps to enact a range of nuanced practices for negotiating, limiting, and avoiding interactions. These include technical practices, which involve manipulating the features and qualities of mobile devices and apps; temporal practices, which involve the timing of messages; and discursive practices, which involve their written or visual content. To contextualise these practices, this thesis draws on a historical comparison with 19th century etiquettes for house visits and calling cards and mid-twentieth century etiquettes for domestic landline telephone calls. Through this historicisation, this thesis argues that participants’ experiences are often a continuation of earlier communication etiquettes, particularly their use of indirect techniques for negotiating unavailability. That said, some etiquette for negotiating unavailability in the context of mobile messaging is yet to stabilise, which can lead to conflict within friendships. Ultimately, this thesis concludes that mobile technologies mediate the negotiation of unavailability not just as material devices that shape actions through their materiality, but also as meaning-filled objects that are bound up in narratives about friendship and technology use.

Supervisors: Bjorn Nansen (SCC), Mike Arnold (SHAPS)