Towards multiactivity as a social and interactional phenomenon

Abstract

Multiactivity – the different ways in which two or more activities can be intertwined and made co-relevant in social interaction – is an inseparable element of everyday life. At the same time it is a little understood form of human conduct. This introductory chapter builds on the basis that multiactivity is a social, verbal and embodied phenomenon, manifest in people’s participation and conduct in interaction, and can be studied empirically by relying on the close analysis of video-recorded data of naturally occurring situations. The chapter connects to previous research on multitasking and outlines how an interactional and social view of the phenomenon can add to our knowledge of how participants engage in, manage and accomplish multiple activities. The chapter outlines new interactional practices and new concepts to describe them.

Social Excursions During the In-between Spaces of Lessons. Students’ Smartphone Use in the Upper Secondary School Classroom

“…A further potential risk of in-class social smartphone use comes from the complexity of managing multiple interactional activities at once. The methods used in this study enable us to discern how the in-between spaces emerge in a complex interplay between classroom resources, students and teachers that could be characterized in terms of multiactivity (Haddington, 2019;Haddington et al, 2014). A clear example of this multiactivity is when Anna, as described in the category "The teaching activity does not require the student's full attention," is focusing on off-task social media on her phone at the same time as she is present on-task helping and interplaying with Sofi, who is doing the more attention-demanding work of hammering.…”

“…CA is fundamentally concerned with understanding the sequentiality of people's social interactions, whereby people coordinate their actions with each other in joint meaning making in different social situations (Sacks et al, 1974;Schegloff, 2007). Recently, some CA scholars have been especially concerned with how people may be engaged in multiple activities at more or less the same time, which has been described as multiactivity (Haddington, 2019;Haddington et al, 2014;Mondada, 2014). The concept of multiactivity is used to focus on the practical accomplishment of progressing and participating in different simultaneous courses of action and how this is achieved in multimodal interactions.…”

Nodding and note-taking

“…(Student counselors' website 2015) Although student counseling is quite a common form of guidance at least in the European context, there is some variety in what is called student counseling. For example, in the study by Hazel and Mortensen (2014) on student counseling in the Danish context, the counselor is another student, and the participants mainly tackle very practical issues related to studying. The current research steers more toward the therapy end of the scale: All the counselors are licensed psychologists who have some kind of a therapy training.…”

Attending to the Mobile Text Summons: Managing Multiple Communicative Activities Across Physically Copresent and Technologically Mediated Interpersonal Interactions

“…While it is itself noteworthy that mobile phone use in the midst of copresent interaction is rarely made accountable throughout our broader collection of interactions involving mobile phones, 7 we found the practice of orally reporting text message content to be a further method for participants to deal with one's mobile-related interactions while also display It is also worth pointing out that the core interactional problems participants deal with throughout our data do not appear to be completely new, nor do they seem oriented to by participants as deserving of moral judgment in practice. The matter of initiating, suspending, and resuming one's activity (whether embodied or verbal) in the midst of a social encounter represents a generic interactional problem that interactants routinely deal with, regardless of its technological dimensions (see Haddington et al, 2014). Furthermore, as others have argued, the use of any new technological means for communication does not necessarily lead to fundamentally different under-standings of communication (Aakhus & DiDomenico, 2016;Aakhus & Jackson, 2005).…”