Conversational rhythm as a disconnective practice among middle-aged adults in situated mobile-messaging interactions.

Timing is an important interactional resource for coordinating mobile and digital interactions, and for signalling interest and involvement in an exchange. This article breaks new ground in exploring conversational rhythm as a 'disconnective' resource through which people suspend, or withdraw from, interactions as a way of asserting agency and autonomy. Focusing on mobile-messaging apps such as WhatsApp, it develops an innovative 'day-in-the-life' methodological approach for exploring how individuals manage multiple online and offline encounters through combining interviews, time-use diaries and messaging data. Interactional analysis of selected extracts involving British women in their 40s and 50s points to an emerging interactive practice of 'suspended alignment' which enables connection-building through alignment while simultaneously keeping interlocutors at a desired distance. Suspended alignment is an increasingly accepted pragmatic norm through which adults maintain key relationships while managing the multiple demands on their time. • Day-in-the-life approach enables insights into how people manage parallel online/offline encounters. • Desire to connect through mobile messaging while maintaining autonomy prompts practice of suspended alignment. • Suspended alignment involves harnessing conversational rhythm to suspend mobile conversations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]