Digital Articulation: Examining Text-Based Linguistic Performances in Mobile Communication Through Keystroke-Logging...

This study examines how text-based mobile communication practices are performatively constructed as individuals compose messages key-by-key on virtual keyboards, and how these synchronous performances (Mobile interface theory: embodied space and locative media. New York, NY: Routledge) reflect the iterative process of constructing and maintaining interpersonal relationships. In doing so, this study reports on keystroke-logging analysis (see Writ. Commun. 30, 358-392) in order to observe how participants (N = 10) composed text as part of everyday mobile communication for the period of one week, subsequently producing 179,996 individual keystroke log-file records. Participants used LogKey, a virtual keyboard application made exclusively for this study to run on the Android mobile operating system. Analysis of keystroke log-file data suggest that timing processes of composing text-messages may differ as participants messaged with different categories of interlocutors, composed on different communication applications, and composed paralinguistic features-such as variants of Lol and Haha Thurlow and Brown, (Discourse Anal. Online, 2003, 1, 1); Tagg, (Discourse of text messaging. 2012, Bloomsbury, UK)-at different turn-taking positions. This evidence suggests that keystroke-logging methods may contribute to understanding of how individuals manage interpersonal relationships in real-time (Please reply! the replying norm in adolescent SMS communication," in The inside text: social, cultural and design perspectives on SMS. (Norwell, MA: Springer), 53-73); (Beyond genre: closings and relational work in texting," in Digital discourse: language in the new media. (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 67-85), and suggests future direction for methodologically studying linguistic performances as part of text-based mobile communication.