CHI2004: Social Norms of Mobile Telephone Use get Scrutiny

Brunel researchers Steve Love and Mark Perry brought their analysis of the experiment described in UN story The Usability of Eavesdropping to CHI2004. They have been looking at the social acceptability of mobile phonecalls taken in proximity to others and the analysis yields food for thought for anyone tackling interaction design in a context of increasingly ubiquitous computing.

'We need to explore and make explicit the social norms around current mobile telephone use,' they said, showing a video of a woman who would clearly have liked to disappear through the wall behind her rather than listen to a nearby young man's conversation with his bank manager. It was a popular session.

They draw up some predictable behaviours. Whilst they anticipate that these will differ across people, occasions and cultural groups, they have extracted the following set of normative rules, grouped into a) expected caller behaviour, and b) acceptable bystander behaviour:

a) expected caller behaviour:

i. Callers are expected to assess the situation and moderate the length of the call, conversational volume, and the content of the conversation.

ii. Callers are expected to make an effort to become as 'apart’ from bystanders as the setting allows.

iii. Callers are expected to appear to be contrite about their call, if not apologising directly, at least acting with some gratitude to the bystanders for ‘putting up’ with their conversation. The level of their contriteness is proportional to the level of transgressing the previous point.

b) acceptable bystander behaviour:

i. Glancing occasionally at the caller to show that they are aware of the ongoing nature of the call. This may be accompanied by a moderated expression (smile, concern, etc.)

2 An example of this can be seen in telephone etiquette, where it is expected that the caller announce themselves to the recipient of the call (and not vice versa), or that the recipient should answer with "Hello?". These are not 'natural’ and emergent user practices, but were actively promoted by the telephone companies early in the last century (according to folklore, "Hello" was championed by Eddison, over Alexander Graham Bell’s less successful greeting of "Hoy, Hoy").

ii. Bystanders are expected to be inattentive to content of the call, despite their often extreme close proximity to the caller. However, both caller and bystander recognise that this is a sham, albeit one that they should continue to act out.

Love and Perry note that these are not absolute behavioural rules, but are used for social orientation. 'Attentiveness to these social norms and to the breaches to them are important features of social interaction that designers can use in developing appropriate technologies that have the potential for social intrusion.'

They are planning a larger study in a naturalistic setting in which they examine bystander behaviour between different groups of people and involving other types of technology as well as the mobile telephone. This should offer up a rich data set that will lead to a better understanding of this behaviour and its implications for design.

"Dealing with Mobile Conversations in Public Places: some implications for the design of socially intrusive technologies" CHI2004

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