This study investigated the use of mobile telephones by males and females in a public bar frequented by professional people. We found that, unlike women, men who possess mobile telephones more often publicly display them, and that these displays were related to the number of men in a social group, but not the number of women. This result was not due simply to a greater number of males who have telephones: we found an increase with male social group size in (...) the proportion of available telephones that were on display. Similarly, there was a positive relationship between the number of visible telephones and the ratio of males to females. Our results further show that the increased display of telephones in groups with more males is not due to the ostensive function of these devices (i.e., the making and receiving of calls), although single males tended to use their phones more. We interpret these results within the framework of male-male competition, with males in larger group sizes functioning in an increasingly competitive environment. This competitive environment is suggested to be akin to a lek mating system in which males aggregate and actively display their qualities to females who assess males on a number of dimensions. We suggest that mobile telephones might be used by males as an indicator of their status and wealth (sensu “cultural ornaments”). (shrink)

This chapter is to offer a critical study of what the human living condition would be like in a new era of hi-tech mobilization, especially the condition of self-government or autonomy, and how, in the Thai perspective, the condition affects culture. Habermas’ analysis of individuation through socialization and Heidegger’s question concerning technology and being are used in the study, and it is revealed that we are now confronted with a new technological condition of positioned individuals in the universe of communication (...) through mobile phones. This situation surely will be realized in a world highly mobilized by the phenomenon of connectedness. This means that we are concerning ourselves with our concrete individuality for our self-expression in that universe. I offer an interpretation that we would hold this kind of individuality to be valuable because of an effect from technological thinking. In addition, comparing this view on individuality with Buddhism, I found that the view offered here is not similar to the Buddhist concept of self as a construction. I offer an argument to show that these concepts are basically different for ethical reasons; while the Buddhist concept still preserves the nobility of the moral agent (Buddhism, after all, is a religion and needs to concern itself with morality), the concrete individuality discussed here is considered only as an instrumental value in a world of hi-tech mobilization. (shrink)

Nomophobia (no-mobile-phone phobia) is the fear and anxiety of being without a mobile phone. This study pioneers the investigation of nomophobia in Afghanistan using the Nomophobia Questionnaire (NMP-Q), addressing a crucial gap in the field. We collected statistical data from 754 undergraduate medical students, comprising men (56.50 %) and women (43.50 %), and analyzed the dimensions of nomophobia. While results revealed that all but two participants were nomophobic, they identified three significant dimensions affecting the level of nomophobia among (...) participants: (a) gender, (b) age, and (c) marital status. The study's contributions are precious, given the peculiarity of Afghan political turmoil, security, and human rights issues, especially for women. For example, the study's data collection was abruptly halted in December 2022 due to the Taliban regime's decision to make it illegal for women to enroll in universities as students. Therefore, while examining the characteristics of nomophobia across societies is imperative, it is also vital to investigate what is true of one society, Afghanistan, at one point in time and space. The study concludes by emphasizing the need to broaden participants' scope in future studies to better understand the prevalence of nomophobia across broader societal contexts and forces. (shrink)

Conversation analytical methodology was used to specify the new opening practices in Finnish mobile call openings, which differ systematically from Finnish landline call openings. Since the responses to a mobile call orient to the summons identifying the caller, answers have changed and diversified. A known caller is greeted. The self-identification opening that was canonical in Finnish landline calls is mainly used for answering unknown callers, while channel-opener openings involve orientation to ongoing mutual business between the speakers. Some of these changes (...) reflect real-time coordination of the social action that the mobility of mobile phones enables. In all, the adoption of new ways of answering a call shows that people orient themselves to affordances that new technologies allow them. Mobile phone communication opens a salient new area both for the analysis of talk-ininteraction itself and also for understanding communicative behaviour in the era of ubiquitous information technology. (shrink)

This paper considers the implications of precautionary restrictions against technologies, in the context of the potential for creating and sustaining rumours. It focuses on the restriction against mobile phone use at petrol stations, based on the rumour that a spark might cause an explosion. Rumours have been substantiated by precautionary usage warnings from mobile phone manufacturers, petrol station usage restrictions, and a general lack of technical understanding. Petrol station employees have themselves spread the rumour about alleged incidents, filling (...) the information gap about the basis for the restriction. (shrink)

ObjectiveTo investigate the effects of cell phone dependence on mental health among undergraduates during the COVID-19 pandemic and further identify the determinants that may affect their mental health in China.MethodsThe data were collected from 602 students at a medical school in Shanghai via an online survey conducted from December 2021 to February 2022. The Mobile Phone Addiction Index and Depression Anxiety Stress Scale were applied to evaluate CPD and mental health, respectively. Independent sample t-test and one-way analysis of (...) variance were employed to compare the means of continuous variables among categorical groups. Correlations between continuous variables were detected using Pearson's correlation analysis. Univariable and multivariable logistic regressions were employed to identify the determinants of mental health.ResultsAmong the 402 eligible students, 73.88% were women with an average age of 20.19 ± 2.36 years. On average, the DASS score was 32.20 ± 11.07, the CPD score was 36.23 ± 11.89, and the cell phone use duration was 7.67 ± 3.61 h/day. CPD was found to have a negative effect on mental health among college students in Shanghai. Additionally, cell phone use duration, age, being senior students, faculty-student relationship, insomnia, tobacco use, obesity, and life satisfaction were clarified as contributing factors to mental health among college students.ConclusionHigh degree of CPD could have a negative effect on college students' mental health, which might lead to some psychological problems. Appropriate actions and effective interventions are highly needed to prevent severe psychological injuries among college students in China. (shrink)

When a piece of fruit is in a bowl, and the bowl is on a table, we appreciate not only the individual objects and their features, but also the relations containment and support, which abstract away from the particular objects involved. Independent representation of roles (e.g., containers vs. supporters) and “fillers” of those roles (e.g., bowls vs. cups, tables vs. chairs) is a core principle of language and higherlevel reasoning. But does such role-filler independence also arise in automatic visual processing? (...) Here, we show that it does, by exploring a surprising error that such independence can produce. In four experiments, participants saw a stream of images containing different objects arranged in forcedynamic relations — e.g., a phone contained in a basket, a marker resting on a garbage can, or a knife sitting in a cup. Participants had to respond to a single target image (e.g., a phone in a basket) within a stream of distractors presented under time constraints. Surprisingly, even though participants completed this task quickly and accurately, they false-alarmed more often to images matching the target’s relational category than to those that did not — even when those images involved completely different objects. In other words, participants searching for a phone in a basket were more likely to mistakenly respond to a knife in a cup than to a marker on a garbage can. Follow-up experiments ruled out strategic responses and also controlled for various confounding image features. We suggest that visual processing represents relations abstractly, in ways that separate roles from fillers. (shrink)

Purpose There is a contradictive debate on factors influencing mobile phone usage awareness among scholars. This study aims to examine factors influencing mobile phone usage awareness for accessing agricultural marketing information. Design/methodology/approach A descriptive cross-sectional research design was used with 400 smallholder grape farmers. The use of structured questionnaires, focus group discussions and key informant interviews helped to collect primary data. Data analysis was subjected to descriptive, ordinal logistic regression and thematic approaches. Findings This study found that farmers (...) were mostly aware of voice calls helping to access buyers and price information. Education, age and sex were the critical factors influencing mobile phone usage awareness among grape smallholder farmers. Originality/value This study contributes to scientific knowledge by providing an understanding of the perceived factors on mobile phone usage awareness within the grape subsector to inform policymakers. (shrink)

Phone is a topic that is not so much explored and examined in Plato. Given eighteen times use of this word in Protagoras, this dialogue can be the suitable place to do a research about its meanings. Here the use of phone covers different subjects and facets of this word as an umbrella word so that in order to reach an ordered and meaningful understanding we place those aspects which are analogous in specific set and title.

In a 1997 paper Jennifer Saul adduces various examples of simple sentences in which the substitution of one co-referential singular term for another appears to be invalid. I address the question of whether anti-substitution is logically justified by examining the validity and soundness of substitution of co-referential singular terms in three simple-sentence arguments each exhibiting a different logical structure. The result is twofold. First, all three arguments are valid, provided Leibniz’s Law is valid with respect to simple sentences . Thus, (...) as far as these arguments are concerned, there is no logical problem with substitution in simple sentences. Second, two of the arguments cannot be sound, because their respective sets of premises are inconsistent. Thus, it would be logically irrational to commit oneself to all the premises of the respective arguments. To the extent that the origin of Saul’s puzzles is in logic , I suggest, tentatively, that substitution may appear to be invalid because the issues of validity and soundness have not been kept separate. I then consider in depth Saul’s first sentence, “Clark Kent enters a phone booth and Superman exits”. Obviously, two-way substitution is trivially valid, if the expressions are co-referential semantically proper names, the conclusion being but a rephrasing of the premise. However, I argue that a non-trivial semantic analysis of this sentence should take account of the diachronicity of Clark Kent’s entrance and Superman’s exit while preserving the internal link between being Superman and being Clark Kent. I propose the following. ‘Superman’ and ‘Clark Kent’ refer to two distinct individual concepts. “Superman is Clark Kent” then no longer expresses the self-identity of an individual bearing two names, but that two named concepts are held together by the requisite relation: wherever and whenever someone falls under the concept of Superman the same individual also falls under the Clark Kent concept, whereas there are exceptions to the converse. This semantic analysis always validates the substitution of ‘Clark Kent’ for ‘Superman’, but validates the substitution of ‘Superman’ for ‘Clark Kent’ only if the additional condition is met that somebody should fall under the Superman concept when Clark Kent. (shrink)

Today's navigation is different, with no paper map or compass. Instead we use a cellphone that has a built-in GPS. Such cellphone is also equipped with an embedded camera that can read signs in various languages and barcodes that most humans cannot decipher. Combined, the GPS and the camera participate in the production and exercise of augmented reality, where reality is presented with layers of information which are accessible only through technological mediation. Currently such mediation is enabled by the cellphone, (...) thereby providing novel dimensions to our experience of mobility. Consequently it produces innovative ways of navigation and a new sensation of reality. (shrink)

With regard to the importance and position of phone for thought and language in Aristotle, and his brief account of it in Περὶ Ψυχῆς / De Anima, here I am going to paraphrase his brief mentioning in the chapter eight of the second book of the mentioned treatise. When we read the pertinent section of 4201b - 421a, we see that Aristotle examines it in connection with “hearing” as a sense that is embedded in his wide discussion about “soul”. (...) But when we go into details under this general topic, we see that phone definition is connected with three concepts such as sound, phantasia and semantic. In other words, Aristotle considers human phone in a unit that consists of “hearing, sound, phantasia and semantic” and all of these within a broader specific discussion about human “soul” denotes to the texture and nature of his account. (shrink)

Studies of protests against mobile phone masts typically concentrate on the potential health risks associated with mobile phones and their masts. Beck’s Risk Society has been particularly influential in informing this debate. This focus on health, however, has merely served to limit the discussion to those concerns legitimated by science conveniently ignoring other disputed issues. In contrast, this article contends that it is necessary to use a wider notion of risk to understand fully how the current political emphasis on (...) active citizenship may have contributed to the protests. It examines how neoliberal governmentality and the move to empower people are in contention with one another. The study draws upon case material from a small village protest group in United Kingdom and argues that much of the tension arises from the encouragement of the public on one hand to become active citizens but on the other to be passive consumers. (shrink)

Modes of engagement. The reader may engage with this article in several different modes. It could be approached in straightforward, if quirky, sociological mode as an exploration of the idea that the literature on post‐divorce arrangements and step‐families, and especially literature, that attends to children's contact with their non‐resident fathers, can be re‐read in order to consider the issue of contact via communication technologies, a form of parent‐child contact not captured in the ways that ‘contact’ is measured in present studies. (...) Of interest in itself, perhaps, this point of entrance opens up onto further questions about the management of human affect, and how rearrangements in lines of affect have reverberations beyond those captured by an Oedipal model, insofar as they are not about contact and severance but are various kinds of displacement for all involved. In particular, I am concerned here with the rearrangement of affect for the fathers as their role becomes dispersed, shared and intermittent, a set of problematics that also includes the various ways in which the very body of the mother is removed or circumvented. On a second level the article speaks to a different literature, in that it is an elaboration of the notion of the network as a dispersed hybrid that entails both human and non‐human entities, within which any absolute distinction between human and non‐human is to be prob‐lematised but, I wish to argue, without losing the specificity of human interaction, that is, the questions of human emotion, human desire and human ethics. This elaboration moves toward a critique of the very ubiquity and endless utility of the network idea through the suggestion that its appeal may conceal moments and movements where more unexpected effects are taking place. Indeed, I suggest that there may be some twists in the familial dynamics of ‘households that no longer hold’, where some selected thoughts from a reading of Deleuze and Guattari, specifically around the notion of ‘becoming’, may lead one to read other stories than that proffered through the master trope of the network, ones that are maybe closer to some of the original impulses behind actor‐network theory. And thirdly, the article may be engaged as a reflection on contemporary ways in which familial life is governed in contemporary Britain. The family as both a site of economic arrangements and a site of the arrangement of human affect‐sexuality‐reproduction, are held together and in tension through forms of contemporary government of the family. Contemporary rationalities of familial morality seek to make its members responsible parents without intervening to the extent that they would seek to make them responsible spouses, seen here in the implication that fathers' economic responsibilities for children are not co‐extensive with their emotional connections to women.1 As opposed to any other familial figure ‐ such as the pater familias or the mother of Donzelot's thesis ‐who may have been the link between family and government, it is through the promotion of the figure of the child that familial life is presently and predominantly governed. It is my contention here that it is through the promise of non‐government that a notion of an ethical parent is promoted, whose duties to his children and his nation‐state should mean that the former should not need to be dependent upon the latter. Alongside other policies that seek to simultaneously promote familial life and paid work‐life through the notion of the ethical citizen, and the attendant judgements of those dependent on welfare state provision, contemporary policies surrounding the household that no longer holds expose the various and contradictory modes by which families are ‘made up’ within contemporary regimes. (shrink)

This study aimed to investigate the effect of perfectionistic concerns on mobile phone addiction and the mediating role of academic procrastination, as well as the moderating role of causality orientations. A cross-sectional sample of 625 Chinese college students completed measures of PC, AP, causality orientations, and MPA. We analyzed the survey data using structural equation modeling in Mplus 8.0. PC was positively related to MPA. In addition, AP partially mediated this association. The hypothesized moderating effect of autonomous orientation and (...) controlled orientation was not supported. Impersonal orientation moderated the second stage of the mediating effect of AP on the PC–MPA link in that the mediating effect was positive when impersonal orientation was high, while the mediating effect was not significant when impersonal orientation was low. The findings confirm the importance of investigating how individual difference contributes to MPA. The implications of the findings for relieving MPA or preventing college students from developing MPA are also discussed deeply and thoroughly. (shrink)

Mobile phones are part of a major growth industry in so-called Third World countries. As in other places, the use of this technology changes communication behaviour. The influence of these changes on indigenous social structures was investigated with a mixed-type questionnaire that targeted parameters such as: in-group vs. out-group communication, involvement with dominant industrial culture and the use of financial resources. Data was collected from indigenous representatives at the United Nations, as well as in Africa from subjects of various cultural (...) backgrounds, and from a control group in Berlin. The results reflect widespread use of mobile phones among indigenous persons, having a segregating effect within the indigenous community, but also enhancing ingroup communication and especially the use of the indigenous language. Mobile phones also facilitate moves from village to town, with the opportunity of frequently communicating with other in-group members. (shrink)

This essay takes as its point of departure Jacques Derrida’s analysis of the phantasm of a mother tongue in his recently published seminar from 1995–1996 on hospitality (Hospitalité I, Éditions du Seuil, 2021). The essay begins by showing that Derrida’s analysis of this phantasm is per­fectly consistent with several of his most important works of the 1960s (from Of Grammatology to Voice and Phenomenon) on the auto-affection of speech and the phantasm of self-presence to which it gives rise. But the (...) essay then demonstrates how those earlier analyses of language and voice are supplemented in Hospitalité by important reflections on what were then very new teletechnologies—including the cell or mobile phone—that do not, as we might have thought, deflate the phantasm of self-presence and of a natural mother tongue but actually lend themselves to it. What these teletechnologies thus end up underscoring, according to Derrida, is the original exappropriation at the heart of all language, including the so-called mother tongue. (shrink)

Contemporary scientific research and public policy are not in agreement over what should be done to address the dangers that result from the drop in driving performance that occurs as a driver talks on a cellular phone. One response to this threat to traffic safety has been the banning in a number of countries and some states in the USA of handheld cell phone use while driving. However, research shows that the use of hands-free phones (such as headsets (...) and dashboard-mounted speakers) also accompanies a drop, leading some to recommend regulation of both kinds of mobile phones. In what follows, I draw out the accounts of the driving impairment associated with phone use implicit in research and policy and develop an alternative account grounded in philosophical considerations. Building on work in a school of thought called postphenomenology, I review and expand concepts useful for articulating human bodily and perceptual relations to technology. By applying these ideas to the case of driving while talking on the phone, I offer an account of the drop in driving performance which focuses on the embodied relationships users develop with the car and the phone, and I consider implications for research and policy. (shrink)

The article proposes to model the phenomenon of the cell phone as a wall-window. This model aims at explicating some of the perceptions and experiences associated with cellular technology. The wall-window model means that the cell phone simultaneously separates the user from the physical surroundings (the wall), and connects the user to a remote space (the window). The remote space may be where the interlocutor resides or where information is stored (e.g. the Internet). Most cell phone usage (...) patterns are modeled as a single dimension according to the level of distraction or attention of the user. In order to accommodate nuanced situations such as augmented reality, I suggest a two-dimensional layout: the wall-window. The wall represents the attention to the immediate physical environment, while the window represents the attention to a remote space. The wall-window model further evolves once a screen is woven into this layout. This addition is easily understood due to the screen’s etymology, which is associated with the concepts of shield or barrier. From a technical perspective, the screen has become an integral part of the cell phone. Furthermore, a screen itself is both a wall and a window. Lastly, once a cell phone is supplemented with a screen, it is easier to refer to it as media. And again, media fits into the wall-window model. (shrink)

Beliefs are concrete particulars containing ideas of properties and notions of things, which also are concrete. The claim made in a belief report is that the agent has a belief (i) whose content is a specific singular proposition, and (ii) which involves certain of the agent's notions and ideas in a certain way. No words in the report stand for the notions and ideas, so they are unarticulated constituents of the report's content (like the relevant place in "it's raining"). The (...) belief puzzles (Hesperus, Cicero, Pierre) involve reports about two different notions. So the analysis gets the puzzling truth values right. (shrink)

BackgroundRecently there have been growing concerns about problematic mobile phone use by adolescent populations. This study aimed to address this concern through a study of severity and correlates of problematic mobile phone use with a sample of Hong Kong adolescents.MethodsData were collected from a sample of adolescents from three local secondary schools using a measuring scale designated for Chinese adolescents. Participants were allocated into groups of “problematic users” and “non-problematic users” based on the number of occurrence of symptoms (...) due to excessive and maladaptive use of mobile phone and possible functional impairments caused by problematic mobile phone use. A group of “at-risk users” was identified. A sample-based examination on distribution of these three groups of users was conducted via frequency counts and percentage calculation. A series of t-test were performed to make comparisons between “problematic” and “non-problematic” groups on selected personality and health related variable. Risk and protective factors were identified via correlational analysis and logistic regression analysis.ResultsUnder a more stringent cut-off criterion of four or more reported symptoms plus one or more reported functional impairments, 22.9% of the adolescents participating in this study could be classified as problematic mobile phone users. However, a more lenient criterion reported a substantially more severe prevalence rate. A new group of “at-risk” adolescents was identified with such a discrepancy of prevalence rate. Gender difference, some risk and protective factors were also identified for developing this technology-related problem.Discussion and ConclusionsAdolescents who are vulnerable to suffer from this technology-related problem deserve more attention from helping professionals. Results of this study throw some insights on how to identify problematic mobile phone user applying a criterion-referenced approach. This study echoes a recent call for adopting a developmental perspective in understanding this problem and conducting research in this area. Anchored on present findings, effective interventions to tackle this rising problem among adolescents are suggested. (shrink)

Recent studies have indicated that trait procrastination as a personality factor could lead to mobile phone addiction, however little is known about the mediating and moderating mechanisms underlying this process. The current study investigated the mediating role of stress in the relationship between trait procrastination and mobile phone addiction, and whether the mediating effect was moderated by gender. A sample including 1,004 Chinese college students completed measurements of trait procrastination, stress, mobile phone addiction, and demographic information. The (...) results showed that trait procrastination was positively related to college students’ mobile phone addiction. Mediation analyses revealed that this relationship was partially mediated by stress. Moderated mediation further indicated that the path between trait procrastination and stress was stronger for male students compared with female students. These findings broadened our knowledge of the underlying mechanisms between trait procrastination and mobile phone addiction, the implications and limitations of this study were discussed. (shrink)

Cellular, or mobile phones are great: they allow people to communicate over long distances whenever and wherever they are, and instantaneously at that when the one called is wearing one too. Having said that, though, it must immediately be added that they, also, have a complex disadvantage, and it is one we are hard pushed to understand. In fact, due to its complexity people simply tend to neglect it, even though everyone in his right mind has had experience with it. (...) Now Walter Benjamin defined aura as “a distance however close it may be”.1) This has standardly been interpreted as a characterisation of an experience of presence, also by Benjamin. This aura supposedly suffered from the rise of photography. Aura can, also, be understood as inertia, the absence of something present. And whether aura is gone or widespread I gladly leave to more speculative-minded thinkers. I submit that we experience a person’s “aura”—her distance however close she may be—when perception tells us the person is present yet our mind realises that she isn’t. I am referring here to the observation had of another person engaged in a cell phone conversation. The inertia of the cell phone caller consists in her incapacity to address those who observe her. I think there is an immoral streak to her selfappointed moral autonomy. In a previous edition of this Dutch-Russian exchange on inertia I argued that our trafficking with facial expressions forms the model with which we’d best understand the workings of art—facial expression is the anthropological foundation of art. My discussion, today, of the cell phone conversation is meant to add to that previous suggestion. (shrink)

The Mobile Phone Addiction Index is a short instrument to assess mobile phone addiction. The Chinese version of this scale has been widely used in Chinese students and shows promising psychometric characteristics. The present study tested the construct validity and measurement invariance of the MPAI by gender in middle school adolescents. The data were collected from 1,395 high school students. Confirmatory factor analysis and multiple-group CFA for invariance tests were conducted on the MPAI model which consisted of 17 (...) observed items and 4 latent factors. Findings showed that the data fit the four-factor structure model well for both males and females. Furthermore, configural, metric, scalar, and residual invariance were established by gender. The results indicated that the MPAI has acceptable psychometric properties when used in adolescents. In addition, with the strict invariance requirements being satisfied, the underlying factor scores for MPAI can be meaningfully compared across genders. To our knowledge, this study is the first attempt to test the measurement invariance of the MPAI across male and female adolescents. Our results will support future research on mobile phone addiction in adolescents. (shrink)

Why does a cell phone have a screen? From televisions and cell phones to refrigerators, many contemporary technologies come with a screen. The article aims at answering this question by employing Emmanuel Levinas’ notions of the Other and the face. This article also engages with Don Ihde’s conceptualization of alterity relations, in which the technological acts as quasi-other with which we maintain relations. If technology is a quasi-other, then, I claim, the screen is the quasi-face. By exploring Levinas’ ontology, (...) specifically what can be identified as his tool analysis, as well as his notion of the face, a new understanding of contemporary technologies can be extracted. Some of these technologies hardly fit into the Heideggerian notion of the hand as the main interface to artifacts. Instead they require the face. Levinas’ notion of the face is analyzed from an ontological perspective and developed in conjunction with the screen. As the screen serves as a quasi-face, it enables the construction of quasi-other technological artifacts. (shrink)

This article presents the results of a study in Flanders on the relationship between adolescents’ peer group status, their gender and their involvement in different types of mobile phone cyberbullying. By means of a free nominations procedure, likeability and perceived popularity scores were calculated for each respondent. Based on these scores, four groups were identified: popular controversial, popular liked, average and rejected adolescents. Even after controlling for age, gender, the frequency of voice calling and the frequency of text messaging, (...) popular controversial adolescents were significantly more likely to make or send threatening/ insulting voice calls or text messages. They also gossiped significantly more frequently by means of voice calls or text messages. No relationship was found between peer group status and making hurtful pictures or videos. A significant interaction effect with gender was found for mobile phone gossiping: Popular controversial girls were more involved in gossiping than popular controversial boys. (shrink)

Arminen claimsthattworecentstudiesof mobilephone conversation come up with incommensurate findings. He relates this to two distinct approaches to the methodology of conversation analysis. In this reply I show that the two studies in question are not incommensurate and argue that Arminen's account is based on a partial description of the findings in Hutchby and Barnett. I go on to show how the latter study presents an approach to the problematic relationship in CA between talk and extraneous contingencies that goes further than (...) Arminen's own proposals. (shrink)

Mobile phones are reportedly the most rapidly expanding e-reading device worldwide. However, the embodied, cognitive and affective implications of smartphone-supported fiction reading for leisure (m-reading) have yet to be investigated empirically. Revisiting the theoretical work of digitization scholar Anne Mangen, we argue that the digital reading experience is not only contingent on patterns of embodied reader–device interaction (Mangen, 2008 and later) but also embedded in the immediate environment and broader situational context. We call this the situation constraint. Its application to (...) Mangen’s general framework enables us to identify four novel research areas, wherein m-reading should be investigated with regard to its unique affordances. The areas are reader–device affectivity, situated embodiment, attention training and long-term immersion. (shrink)

In this article, I adopt the socio-cognitive approach to critical discourse analysis to interpret the discourse found on the popular UK radio phone-in programme the Nigel Farage Show. Evidence emerged of positive self-presentation and negative other representation through denials of prejudice, discursive de-racialisation and the use of war metaphors and lexis referencing legality, criminality and the collective. However, the control over this forum was its defining feature which appeared to propagate an anti-immigration stance and normalise the aforementioned lexis. This (...) control was evident through the selection and placement of contributors, the influence of cognitively central participants, the foregrounding of Trump’s rhetoric, topic selection, protection offered to in-group members and topicalisation which supported the in-group and served to vilify the views and identity of the out-group. All of which led to the creation of a closed community devoid of alternatives. (shrink)

This study examines the sequential and situated organization associated with framing locational formulations by dislocated parties to mobile phone calls for the joint accomplishment of location-related social action. The data come from 22 mundane Farsi mobile phone calls involving location inquiring and/or reporting. The analysis of the data, informed by conversational analysis and Levinson’s conceptual framework of perspective-taking, adds frame of reference to Schegloff’s location, membership, and topic or activity analyses operative in the selection of locational formulations. The (...) trajectory plotted for location-related action indicates the contingent roles which material, linguistic and semiotic resources play in the selection of locational formulations deployed for co-presence purposes. The findings suggest consequentiality of the-relevant-next action for the framing of locational descriptions and provide insight into how conversationalists interact with their physical environment in a wider social context. (shrink)

In order to accommodate for the present shortage of oocyte donors, oocyte-donation programs place ads in college newspapers and provide large monetary compensation to encourage participation. Large compensation acts as a strong incentive for young women to undergo the potentially risky procedure of donation. In this enticing situation, it is particularly important for programs to fully inform prospective donors of the risks of the procedure so that they can accurately weigh the costs and benefits of donating. However, because oocyte-donor programs (...) must alleviate the shortage of donors if they wish to maintain a financially viable business, there is reason to fear that they may minimize or misrepresent risks when recruiting egg donors. In this pilot study, the risk information provided by programs (n=19) to prospective oocyte donors in a preliminary phone call inquiry was investigated. The majority of the programs provided incomplete and/or inaccurate risk information. Policy changes are recommended to reduce the potential for undue influence and to standardize and regulate the risk information provided to prospective egg donors. (shrink)