World attending in interaction: Multitasking, spatializing, narrativizing with mobile devices and Tinder

•Mobile devices embedded in conversational interaction blur online–offline spaces.•The blurring of spaces co-occurs with an incipient state of continued multitasking.•Many activities in play at any one moment challenge participants.•World attending, i.e., noticing, of online–offline spaces is a recurrent practice.•World attendings, a type of breaking news story, co-occur with projections.

Studies of new mobilities have emphasized changes in spatialization processes affecting conditions for conversational interaction. Conversations from four Ethiopian-Israeli male teens walking in a northern, peripheral Israeli city to and from pickup games (soccer/football, basketball) at public parks are analyzed. The data selected below all involve talk whilst using a social networking application called Tinder. Analyses follow a narrative practices approach (De Fina and Georgakopoulou, 2008 and De Fina and Georgakopoulou, 2011), particularly that of small stories (Georgakopoulou, 2007). These teens are found to be world attending (a subtype of breaking-news stories) in voicing their noticings of the perceptible surroundings amidst pursuit of individual local interactional projects, i.e. a one-upmanship often exploitive of narrative practices of projections, i.e., unrealized possibilities, the irrealis. The introduction of mobile devices into conversational interactional space provides an added/resource of potential items (referents) to be attended to and thus creates a continued state of incipient multitasking across offline and online spaces.