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This paper is concerned with the appropriation of the affordances of text-based communication in digital media to evoke associations with multimodal communication, specifically visual, auditory and haptic experiences accompanying observed nonverbal phenomena and actions in text-messages. In order to account for these phenomena, the notion of kineticon is introduced and theorised from the perspective of its constitutive elements, established conventions, and functions. Through the analysis presented here, I identify a user-initiated language development serving to express multimodal meanings within a written medium often simplistically treated as mono-modal. I also demonstrate that the Goffmanian categories of given and given off expression need to be reconsidered in the light of the emergence of the expression of multimodal content in text-based digital media. The paper proposes a methodological approach to the analysis of user-initiated language phenomena, which includes naturally occurring data collection, the use of online participant observations, and detailed interviews using data as prompts.

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This article draws on data from an ethnographic project to explore the ways in which migrant micro-entrepreneurs exploit mobile messaging apps to co-construct mobile chronotopes: dynamic configurations of time and space negotiated by geographically separated participants, who draw on different contexts and frames of understanding. Analysis of mobile messages by two couples—Chinese butchers in Birmingham and Polish shop-owners in London—informed by interview and interactional data collected at work and home, suggests they discursively negotiate and exploit multiple chronotopic layers, creating complex intersections between virtual and physical spaces in everyday interactions. We focus on the role that multilingual and multimodal semiotic resources play in co-constructing mobile chronotopes. In particular, we explore critical junctures at which communicative expectations are challenged, rendering mobile chronotope negotiation visible. Our concept of the mobile chronotope has implications for both the theorisation of mobile phone communication and understanding how chronotopes function in contemporary transnational migrant discourse. (Chronotope, migrant entrepreneur, mobile messaging, transnational migration)*

This article draws on researcher vignettes to explore ethical decisions made in the process of collecting and analysing mobile messaging data as part of a team ethnographic project exploring multilingualism in superdiverse UK cities. The research involves observing key participants at work as well as recording them at home and collecting their digital interactions. The nature of ethnographic research raises ethical issues which highlight the impossibility of divorcing ethics from project decision-making. We therefore take on board a reconceptualisation of research ethics not as an external set of guidelines but as being at the core of research, driving decision-making at all steps of the process. The researcher vignettes on which we draw in exploring this process facilitate a reflexive approach and enable us to identify and address ethical issues in our research. In this article, we focus on the potential impact that digital communication technologies can have on the kinds of relationships that are possible between researchers and research participants, and on the roles that both carry out within the project. In doing so, we explore the part that digital communications play in the co-construction of social distance and closeness in research relationships. Our discussions around these issues highlight the need for an awareness not only of how our participants' media ideologies shape their use and perceptions of digital technologies, but also how our own assumptions inform our handling of the digital data.