Social Interaction. Video-Based Studies of Human Sociality.

2018 VOL. 1, Issue 1  

ISSN: 2446-3620

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7146/si.v1i1.105497

Social Interaction

Video-Based Studies of Human Sociality

CONFIGURING MATERIALITY, MOBILITY, AND MULTIACTIVITY: INTERACTIONS WITH OBJECTS IN CARS

Maurice Nevile[a]

Department of Design and Communication, University of Southern Denmark

Abstract

This paper explores how material objects feature within social interaction in the car. Objects in the car commonly include phones or other technologies, food, bags and carry items, body care products, written materials, clothing, and toys. The paper considers two examples to show how participants’ interaction with objects can be occasioned and conducted. In the first, driver spontaneously initiates involvement with the object to materially support an already-developing course of social activity (singing to passenger). In the second, driver prepares an object as a new focus of social activity with passenger (an envelope containing photos and a thank-you card). In both cases, we see especially how driver and passenger, as both vehicle occupants and social participants, organise the demands of attending to and handling objects with the dynamic demands of driving, and relative to the car’s movement in the external environment. We see how driver, in particular, embodiedly orients to objects (gaze, handling) so that driving is treated as the primary activity in a multiactivity setting. This study therefore highlights interaction in cars as a site for configuring materiality, mobility, and multiactivity. Data examples are from a corpus (27 hours, 90 journeys) of video recordings of ordinary car journeys in Australia. The language is English.

Keywords: cars, driving, materiality, mobility, multiactivity, objects, participation

1. Introduction

This paper examines how material objects feature in social interaction in cars, using as data video recordings from ordinary journeys. By considering two examples in detail it highlights how participants (driver and passenger) occasion and organise their involvement with objects, especially relative to the demands of driving and the circumstances of the mobile driving environment. The first example shows how an object (drink bottle) features spontaneously and contributes to a social action already underway; the second example shows how an object (envelope with papers inside) is prepared and then features as itself the focus for social activity.

The car’s role beyond mere transport, as a site for personal, social, and work life is typically considered by sociologists and social geographers, especially within studies of automobility and mobility(ies) (e.g. Featherstone, Nigel, & Urry, 2005; Cohen, 2006; Hagman, 2006; Huijbens & Benediktsson, 2007; Redshaw, 2008; Ferguson, 2009). These mostly draw upon surveys, interviews, or statistical or other documentary records or provide ethnographic, conceptual, historical, or theoretical discussions. They are predominantly concerned with noting the car’s significance, role, and impact for groups, locations, populations, or purposes and in and for wider societal and cultural constitution and change.

However, when we go inside the car and video record drivers’ and passengers’ conduct during ordinary, naturally occurring journeys, we can see precisely how they create cars as sites of social life, in situ and moment-to-moment. Drivers use cars to get from A to B, but they also often share the drive with others, and as social participants, drivers and passengers interact to, for example, manoeuvre and navigate to their destination, conduct personal and social activities (e.g. as family, friends, colleagues), or get work done (see collection Haddington, Keisanen, & Nevile, 2012; and earlier e.g. Laurier, 2004, 2005). Interaction also enables teaching/learning driving itself (De Stefani & Gazin, 2014). Social interaction occurs either for driving, serving the driving activity and its goals, or with driving, merely featuring alongside the driving activity (Nevile, 2012, p. 173). Participants interact relative to practices of driving and the car’s movement within external physical surroundings, so realising “the intertwining of multiple modalities of language, the body, and artefacts of the material world of the car” (Haddington, Nevile, & Keisanen, 2012: p. 102).

We see too that cars are usually populated with material objects like food and drink, bags (handbags, briefcases, shopping), technical devices (phones, tablets), clothing and grooming items, toys, wallets and payment cards, and printed matter (books, envelopes, maps etc.). Some objects might be there temporarily, brought along for the journey, but others are present more or less permanently, cluttering seats, floors, storage places, or any available space. So, this paper furthers studies of interaction in cars by focussing on the sociality of objects, how they come to feature in interaction between driver and passenger. Examples show how and when objects can come to be talked about, gazed at, touched and handled, passed from person to person, retrieved and placed, and how participants conduct and organise the demands of attending to and handling objects with the demands of driving in a mobile environment.

The paper builds directly on three areas of rising research interest in conversation analysis studies of social interaction, evidenced by recent collections.

1.1 Materiality/objects (see Nevile, et al., 2014a): Objects feature within and can shape courses of social activity, for example, as used, touched, handled, perceived, understood, appreciated, requested, shared, categorised, selected, instructed or learned, planned, created or transformed, invoked or imagined—or otherwise as relevant for whatever social action is underway. Nevile et al. (2014b) distinguish between two potentials for objects-in-interaction, as either practical accomplishments, emerging as the outcome of processes of interaction, or as situated resources, somehow involved in and even enabling whatever it is participants are doing.

1.2. Mobility (see Haddington, et al., 2013): Participants can interact when on the move from one location to another, for example simply by walking, or by using a mode of transport such as riding a bike, onboard an aircraft or maritime vessel, or on the road in a bus, or commonly, as here, in a car. In diverse ways, participants’ actions orient to the demands or opportunities of mobility and to the dynamic surrounding environment, perhaps to coordinate nature or direction of movement, to notice or act on something, or even to accomplish mobility itself. Mobility might also be subject to certain constraints. Here we see that the car seats driver and passenger side-by-side, facing forwards in the direction of travel (cf. the airline cockpit, Nevile, 2004, 2010; car passengers can also be behind the driver), and driving is subject to road boundaries and markings; controls such as traffic lights, signage, and formal rules-of-the-road; and the conduct of other traffic.

1.3. Multiactivity (see Haddington, et al., 2014): Participants in social interaction can make relevant and undertake two or more concurrent activities—in short, do more than one thing at a time. Participants orient to and coordinate the timing, order, and performance of multiple activities, for example, in parallel shifting from one to the other or by suspending and later resuming one activity. This paper extends interest in the car as a multiactivity setting (Mondada, 2012; Nevile, 2012) by examining interaction beyond talk and gesture to include material objects (see Nevile & Haddington, 2010).

Investigations relative to these three areas reflect a growing appreciation (Nevile, 2015) of social interaction’s order and accomplishment as inherently embodied, situated, and realised within the characteristics and circumstances of the physical surrounding environment (especially after C. Goodwin, 1981).

2. Data

Data are video recordings of drivers and passengers during ordinary, real-world journeys, collected in Australia for a study of in-car distractions and their impact on driving activities (Nevile & Haddington, 2010). The language is English. The full data set is approximately 27 hours of video recordings, representing 90 journeys varying in length from 4 and half minutes to over an hour. Most journeys were conducted within city and suburban confines, with a couple to neighbouring towns and one intercity trip. Cameras were mounted and operated by participants, under instruction from researchers, and captured the driver’s actions and usually also the actions of the front seat passenger as well as some details of the external environment. All journeys had a front-mounted camera (i.e. facing occupants), and 15 also had a rear-mounted camera (i.e. behind occupants). Both examples feature a driver and a front seat passenger, and in both cases the participants are a couple. Note that in Australia the traffic drives to the left, so driver sits to the right.

The transcriptions use two ways to indicate embodied conduct and its timing relative to emerging talk: 1) with italics and forward slashes (/, //); 2) with video stills and highlight boxes (participants’ faces have been anonymised). Details of the driving situation are in small caps, for example to show that the car slows for a red light. The second example first presents a timeline to indicate only embodied conduct.

3. Analyses: Object opportunities in the car

3.1 Example 1. Spontaneous object opportunity: Driver sings with bottle microphone

In the first example, driver (DVR) spontaneously appropriates a drink bottle as a microphone, with which he ‘serenades’ the front seat passenger (PA), his girlfriend, to music playing on the car’s entertainment system. As the excerpt begins, the car is stopped at a red traffic light. A previous topic of conversation has ended, and after a few seconds of silence, PA comments on the music with “it’s really like dancing” (line 02), “you could dance to this.” (line 04). DVR treats this literally, by beginning to tap on the steering wheel, moving his upper body to the music, and then singing along while turning his head towards PA. She treats this as a form of serenade, “is tha- (.) is that you serenading me?” (lines 11-12) and offers a challenge for him to do ‘better’ (line 15, “>can y’< give it a better attempt.”). As his response, DVR grasps a plastic bottle and sings into it. The example ends as DVR relinquishes the ‘microphone’ to the PA as the traffic light changes to green, and he must again drive. I will look first at how the bottle-as-microphone is relevantly and socially occasioned, and then consider how it is handled relative to the emerging demands of driving.

Extract 1a.

As he sings along to the music, DVR alternates his gaze between PA and forwards to the road and traffic, maintaining an ongoing orientation to the need to react when the light changes to green. When PA makes her challenge for DVR to make a ‘better attempt’ at his ‘serenade’, DVR responds by resuming singing, turning his head and gaze towards PA and clasping his hands together to simulate a microphone (line 18). Almost immediately, he reaches for a plastic drink bottle stored at the central console and lifts it to his face to replace his hands-only ‘microphone’ with a material one (line 18). He treats the bottle as physically and visually more equivalent to an actual microphone, in that he can hold and sing with it. So, DVR opportunistically transforms the bottle, as an available physical object, from its intended and usual function for drinking to something relevant for a specific social action in the moment—a microphone—to ‘better’ perform his serenade (see e.g. Streeck, 1996). As an actual simulated object, the bottle is an upgrade from merely clasping hands together as if holding a simulated object. However, DVR retains an orientation to driving. At the end of phrasing for a line in the song, and as PA laughs (line 20), DVR stops singing and holds the bottle in his right hand while with his left he manipulates the gear stick (apparently, we soon see, to engage first gear).

Most generally, we see how PA and DVR treat the break in demands of driving, being now stopped at a traffic light, as allowing them to engage in social activity involving resources beyond talk. They gaze towards each other, and DVR removes both hands from the wheel, orients his upper body left, and finds and handles a material object to ‘serenade’ his partner. In short, in the car DVR and PA are not just occupants, sharing a journey, but with a bottle-as-microphone they share an activity as a couple within the car’s confines of seatbelts and side-by-side seating.

Extract 1b.

Having manipulated the gear stick, DVR resumes singing with his bottle microphone, again holding it in both hands, and turns to face PA. However, he stops singing when he notices a change in the surrounding environment, likely traffic moving off as evidence of the light changing to green, and he quickly reorients his body and gaze to fully forwards, while simultaneously seeking to relinquish the bottle by holding it in front of PA, as an offer, who then accepts it.So both DVR and PA treat the bottle as incompatible with the demand to resume driving, allowing DVR to use both hands for the gear stick and to control the steering wheel. The once-microphone is again merely a bottle, and the impromptu serenade is over. DVR looks right and left to check for traffic as the car accelerates into the intersection, and although PA offers to return the microphone (line 25, “d’you want y’ new< microphone back?”), she presents this as non-serious by laughing and lowering the bottle to her lap before DVR can respond (lines 25-26). His response makes salient the bottle as now inappropriate, and his own role and accountability as driver, with “no::: I am trying t’ dri::ve.” (line 26).

3.2 Example 2. Prepared object: Driver shares photos and a card

The second example is longer, and we see a different couple, driving home at the end of a working day. Again, the one passenger is seated in the front. The object’s involvement is not occasioned spontaneously within a developing course of interaction. Instead, DVR prepares access to the object in advance so that she can present it as a focus of social activity. The object is an envelope containing two photos and a thank-you card and is not readily available to her in the driving seat. While PA tells a story about his working day, DVR retrieves the envelope from a carry bag, which she locates at the rear of the car, and places it in her lap. Presented first is a summary timeline highlighting her preparatory embodied conduct, covering 25 seconds. Then follows a transcription of interaction as DVR introduces and shares the envelope’s contents with PA. She handles, shows, and passes the written items, and repeatedly gazes to monitor PA’s responses while primarily directing her gaze forwards to monitor the road and traffic ahead (note: PA is the author and is wearing sunglasses).

DVR accesses an envelope in preparation for sharing: Summary timeline (showing elapsed time in seconds)

The car has been stopped in traffic at a red light for a few seconds, and the front seat passenger is telling a story from his day’s work. The driver orients her body left and gazes and reaches down towards the floor behind the front seats. Around nine seconds later, she begins to lift up a bag, which she places in her lap. She reaches in and removes an envelope, which she also places in her lap. She then again orients her body left and gazes and reaches left towards the rear of the car to deposit the bag, and spends a few seconds adjusting its placement.

Two things are especially noteworthy. First, we see how DVR finds and retrieves an object, an envelope, in preparation for the social action to show and share its contents with PA. DVR allows for the time and physical effort to locate and handle the bag, and remove the envelope, by initiating and conducting this activity while the car is stopped at a red light, with no immediate and competing demands to drive. This proves effective because the envelope is apparently difficult to find and retrieve: DVR lifts the bag from the rear floor, placing it in her lap, only after spending some seconds rummaging through it. DVR can better see and search within the bag with it on her lap. Second, DVR ongoingly monitors the external driving circumstances for possible next-demands for her driving. While gazing to the rear of the car for her object search/reach, she repeatedly redirects her gaze up and forwards to the road ahead (at times 05, 13, 18, and 22 seconds), checking for a traffic light change to green that will make driving off possible. As the light changes to green (time 23), DVR places the envelope in her lap, engages the gears, and the car moves forwards.

As the recording continues, the car travels with traffic along a main road. When PA concludes his story about his working day (“….and what I’ve gotta do is t’ get this wo:rk done.”, lines 01-02), DVR takes the opportunity to share something from her own working day, the contents of the envelope she had earlier retrieved and placed in her lap. With the envelope now easily accessible, she removes and passes the photos and then the card to PA, and the two participants talk about them.

DVR first shares two photos. As soon as PA comes to the end of his story, DVR reaches down to her lap (line 03), where she had earlier placed the envelope, and begins her own workday story through which she will introduce the items (line 04, “a- little whi:le ago ...”). A workplace visitor has brought in some photos and given them to DVR. As DVR handles the envelope to remove its contents, she alternates her gaze from her lap to the road ahead, and her hand movements attract PA’s attention: He gazes to her lap. Just as DVR mentions the photos (line 09, “she t-took photos”), she lifts one from her lap and gazes at it before returning her gaze to the road while holding the photo in front of PA, who takes it (line 10). DVR alternates her gaze between down to her lap and up and forwards to the road ahead as she handles the second photo (line 10, “°th’t she took.°), and PA responds (line 12, “oh how lovely:.”). DVR gazes forwards to the road ahead as she passes the second photo to PA (line 13).

We see how DVR maintains primary gaze orientation to the road ahead. To handle and pass the photos while driving, DVR must occasionally gaze down to her lap, but only briefly, and regularly returns her gaze up and forwards. Also, DVR never gazes fully left to PA, the recipient of the objects, but instead targets her ‘passing’ only approximately. While maintaining gaze forwards to the road ahead, she holds each photo in front of PA, demonstrating them as available for him to take. She does not gaze to track them or PA’s reaching. Apart from gaze, we can note that DVR has her left hand off the steering wheel for extended periods (a few seconds) as she finds and handles each photo and holds them out towards PA.

However, we see below that as PA holds and considers the photos, DVR does turn her head and gaze left towards PA, first as she elaborates upon their origins (lines 14-15) and then again when PA offers further assessments (lines 17, 28, 37).

Indeed, when the car slows for a next red light, and PA refers to one photo specifically (lines 26-27, “I like< the one in the office a little bit better.”), DVR not only gazes left but also points with her left finger on the photo to highlight a particular detail (line 33), before moving her hand to shift gears and back to the wheel, and returning her gaze forwards to the road. Thus, although DVR did not gaze towards PA when passing the photos, she does redirect her gaze from the road ahead as they discuss the photos, and the car’s slowing for a red light seems to allow DVR to also gesture to a photo as she elaborates upon its details.

Also, as PA looks at the photos, DVR again gazes away from the road down to her lap, twice, as she handles the envelope with the thank-you card inside as the next item she will share (lines 24, 36). We see below that she gazes down a third time before lifting the envelope in front of PA (line 40), introducing it as she returns her gaze forwards to the road ahead (“and that’s- that was waiting for me today.” line 42). DVR again gazes forwards while waiting for PA to take the item (line 42).

DVR briefly gazes left four times as PA handles and reads the envelope and card, both aloud and silently (lines 46, 51 twice, 53) and also as PA assesses the card and places it back into the envelope (line 58). On each occasion, DVR returns her gaze forwards to the road ahead, thereby maintaining her primary embodied commitment to the demands of driving. So, as for the photos, DVR attends ongoingly to an object well beyond physically passing it to PA. As PA handles and responds to the thank-you card, it remains a focus of social activity between PA and DVR, as something of value to DVR (line 56, “isn’t that sweet?=°>it was a< nice thing to have today.°”), which she offers to PA to share an event from her working day. PA appreciates this through his response immediately to read and assess the card (line 54, “a::h that’s very nice.”; line 58, “how nice to have a (0.2) /a rewa::rd from your workplace”), to which DVR attends and responds through talk and embodied conduct.

Through two examples, this paper has sought to show how driver and passenger interact to occasion and organise their involvement with material objects and so embodiedly orient to and accomplish the car as a mobile multiactivity setting. That is, participants coordinate attending to and handling objects with the demands of driving activity and changes in the driving situation (e.g. the car’s movement, other traffic, traffic lights), so that driving is treated as the primary activity. In particular, we saw that drivers ensured that they met the need to gaze forwards to monitor the road and traffic ahead and the need to have their hands available to control the steering wheel and gear stick. In both cases, we also saw how being stopped at a red traffic light—a pause in the demands of mobile driving activity—allows drivers an opportunity to initiate or involve themselves and others in an object-oriented non-driving activity. A red light is an object opportunity, a chance actively to engage with material objects for interactional purposes.

The examples distinguished between spontaneous and prepared interaction with objects in the car. In Example 1, the driver appropriated a nearby drink bottle as an impromptu microphone to serenade his partner, responding to her challenge of the moment to do it ‘better’. In Example 2, the object is an envelope from which the driver removes two photos and a thank-you card. The driver prepares the envelope in advance by making it easily accessible. When stopped at a red light, she reaches for and locates the envelope in a bag on the rear-seat floor, then moves it to her lap. Later, having resumed driving activity, the driver takes the opportunity to share its contents with the passenger.

Analysts of social interaction increasingly appreciate how “we are always in our bodies, always everywhere embodied beings, acting and doing things in a material world” (Nevile, 2015, p. 141). We are also always everywhere surrounded by objects that feature in social practice in various and situated ways. We are reminded here that objects are not mere material things but feature within interaction for the courses of activity through which people realise and make sense of social life, wherever they may be and whatever they may be doing. We saw how participants engaged with objects as they experienced the car as a site to accomplish being familiar, being a couple, though a light-hearted serenade or by sharing a gift as a highlight of an ordinary working day. They did so while subject to the particular contingencies of the car and driving, including the spatial and physical seating constraints of the car’s interior, and the car’s mobility relative to traffic and the surrounding environment. In short, we saw in detail how objects were fitted for and into trajectories of talk and embodied conduct for social actions that occurred with drivers’ ongoing attention and efforts to drive.

This paper also contributes to driving and road safety research that recognises objects as a commonly occurring source of driver distraction, an element of the driving situation that is unrelated to driving but can negatively affect a driver’s awareness and conduct. Those studies mostly use experimental and simulated scenarios, statistics, and surveys, to document factors influencing driver behaviour and driving performance. They categorise and count ‘object-events’ such as ‘locate’, ‘reach for’, ‘handle’, and ‘pass’, to examine impacts on driving outcomes (see Nevile & Haddington, 2010:1-13). Significantly, we saw here how an object-in-interaction can remain a distraction well beyond the efforts to ‘locate’ (etc.) it. In Example 1, the bottle, held in two hands, became something that the driver quickly needed to relinquish when the traffic light changed to green, only for the passenger jokingly to offer it back to him. In Example 2, the driver took advantage of stopping at a red light to find and move an envelope to her lap, in preparation to share its contents (the photos and thank-you card) with the passenger. Most notably, this ‘sharing’ involved not just physical passing, but through gaze and talk ongoingly to monitor and respond to the passenger’s acceptance and reactions. With conversation analysis’ focus on the details of naturally occurring interaction and participants’ in situ embodied conduct, we can better understand how people drive things.

This research was conducted within the project Social Objects for Innovation and Learning, developed by the author and Johannes Wagner with funding from the Velux Foundation (Velux Fonden, 2014-2017) and the University of Southern Denmark. Data recordings were originally collected for the study In-car Distractions and their Impact on Driving Activities, funded by a Road Safety Research Grant (2008-2010) awarded to the author by the Australian national government.

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[a] Contact Maurice Nevile, nevile@sdu.dk, Universitetsparken 1, 6000 Kolding, Denmark