'oh isch FIND_s nich;'

This paper adds to the growing field of conversation analytical research on smartphone-use in face-to-face interactions. Whenever smartphones are used in mobile-supported sharing activities – e.g. to show a picture to co-present others – the smartphone user needs to search for and find the "searchable object" in the World Wide Web, an App or on the device's local memory. Analyzing audio-recordings of naturally-occurring conversations, this paper identifies two types of practices of speech that explicitly orient to ongoing smartphone-supported searches: Collaborative search (cf. Brown/McGregor/McMillan 2015) and search-accompanying commentary by the smartphone-user. Both practices verbally provide for the accountability of the otherwise opaque device use. They differ in the way they produce opportunities for co-present others to substantively contribute to the progression of the search as well as the degree to which they produce the search as an interactionally public event.
Journal für Medienlinguistik, Bd. 2 Nr. 2 (2019): Special Issue: Mobile Medienpraktiken im Spannungsfeld von Öffentlichkeit, Privatheit und Anonymität