UCLIC Seminar - Embeddedness and sequentiality in social media

Speaker: Stuart Reeves, Mixed Reality Lab, University of Nottingham

Over the last decade, there has been an explosion of work around social media within CSCW. A range of perspectives have been applied to the use of social media, which we characterise as aggregate, actor-focussed or a combination. We outline the opportunities for a perspective informed by ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EMCA)--an orientation that has been influential within CSCW, yet has only rarely been applied to social media use. EMCA approaches can complement existing perspectives through articulating how social media is embedded in the everyday lives of its users and how sequentiality of social media use organises this embeddedness. We draw on a corpus of screen and ambient audio recordings of mobile device use to show how EMCA research is generative for understanding social media through concepts such as adjacency pairs, sequential context, turn allocation / speaker selection, and repair.

About the speaker: Stuart Reeves is EPSRC Senior Research Fellow at the Mixed Reality Lab, in the School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham, UK. He researches social and collaborative technologies, investigating how people use diverse kinds of interactive devices and systems in real world situations and places. As EPSRC Fellow he is exploring the connections between academic HCI research and the work of practitioners in UX and design professions. He is also author of the book Designing Interfaces in Public Settings.

Time:Wednesday 2nd November, 3pm.

Venue: Room G01, 66-72 Gower Street.