The Constitutive Practices of Public Smartphone Use

Abstract

The smartphone has become the most ubiquitous piece of personal technology, giving it significant social importance and sociological relevance. In this article, we explore how the smartphone interacts with and impacts social interaction in the setting of the urban café. Through analyzing 52 spontaneous in-depth interviews related to social interaction in cafés, we identify three categories of smartphone use in social settings: interaction suspension, deliberately shielding interaction, and accessing shareables. These categories comprise the constitutive smartphone practices that define the social order of public smartphone use within an interactionist sociological framework.