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In computer-mediated communication, users cannot ensure that responsive postings are placed in a directly adjacent position. Yet, paired actions are discernible in which a first pair part (FPP) makes a second pair part (SPP) conditionally relevant. While previous studies of short messaging service (SMS) communication show that users usually send clusters of FPPs and that SPPs are ordered in the same chronology, little is known about sequential practices of dealing with multiple FPPs in text-based WhatsApp communication. This article shows that in German WhatsApp dialogues, users apply a chronological as well as a reversed ordering of SPPs. It is argued that this result can only be partly attributed to the affordances of the mobile messenger. Rather, users arrange SPPs in order to foreground particular topics in extended, chat-like dialogues.

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The paper contrasts a monological approach to the analysis of mobile phone text messaging with a dialogical analysis which takes the interactive nature of text messaging as its starting point. Based on a corpus of dyadic text message dialogues, the "classic" text message format is compared to internet-based WhatsApp messages in a conversation-analytic approach. It is argued that WhatsApp messages differ from "classic" text messages not only in their multimodal variability. Writers also use different practices of marking off dialogues as separate entities. Moreover, different sequential patterns emerge in WhatsApp communication: Writers tend to send adjacency pair parts in separate messages which in some cases even leads to a pair-by-pair interaction.