Doing being an ordinary technology and social media user Jessica S. Robles a, * , Stephen DiDomenico b , Joshua Raclaw c a Loughborough University, Brockington Building, Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough, LE113TU, UK b New Paltz State University of New York, 51 Coykendall Science Building, New Paltz, NY,12561, USA c West Chester University, 720 High Street, Main Hall 532, West Chester, PA,19383, USA article info Article history: Keywords: Accounts Social media Technology Discourse analysis Stance Identity abstract This paper uses discourse and conversation analysis of naturally-occuring conversations to describe how participants construct themselves as “ordinary” users of communication technologiesddevices such as mobile phones, their communicative affordances, and the mediated interaction they enable (e.g., access to online communication via social media platforms). The three practices analyzed are (1) managing motivations by downplaying interest and stake in using technology and participating in online activities; (2) calibrating quantities of one’s time and involvement using social media; (3) identifying investments in social media use through categories and identities that position users as appropriate or inappropriate. These techniques comprise an accounting practice that accomplishes identity construction in service of situated social actions to manage the moral implications of communication technology use. Ó 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction New communication technologies and their affordances, particularly smartphones and social media, are a frequent source of complaint in public discourse. From decrying the behavior of millennials to bemoaning the loss of genuine conversation, media often depict modern technology use as a new, and undesirable, “normal” (e.g., Beck, 2016; Roberts and David, 2016). In actual face-to-face conversation, then, participants are faced with the dilemma of how to perform and construct their own technological conduct as unproblematic. After all, we are accountable for being anything other than “ordinary,” where or- dinary is the natural, taken-for- granted attitude that pervades and holds together the social world (Garfinkel, 1967). How then do people manage the potential reproachability of their conduct against this backdrop of recurrent public criticisms of how people use new communication technology? This paper analyzes ordinary conversations to examine how the mundane yet meaningful features of social interaction are enrolled in socially constructing stances around talk about technology and social media use. Drawing on ethnomethodology and applying discourse analysis and aspects of conversation analysis, we focus on moments in which participants produce accounts that implicate norms of communication technology usage, specifically devices such as mobile phones and their communicative affordances (Gershon, 2017; see also: Hutchby, 2001), or the possibilities for mediated interaction that these devices enable (e.g., access to online communication via social media platforms). We draw on two complementary meanings of accounts, including the acountability interactants have to co-producing ordinary intelligible meaning (Garfinkel, 1967; Sacks, 1984), as well as accounts as speech acts and social activities in which proffering and demanding accounts tends to occur moments in interaction where morality is at stake (Buttny,1993). These are related concepts, since as Garfinkel (1967) showed with his breaching experiments, something that threatens the apparent normalness of day-to-day interaction (Garfinkel,1967) * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: j.j.robles@lboro.ac.uk (J.S. Robles), didomens@newpaltz.edu (S. DiDomenico), jraclaw@wcupa.edu (J. Raclaw). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Language & Communication journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/langcom https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2018.03.002 0271-5309/Ó 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Language & Communication 60 (2018) 150–167