Ambient Sociability and Its Effects:

Scenes From A Rhetorical Ethnography of Practice in Third

Places

Stacey Pigg, PhD | University of Central Florida | staceypigg@gmail.com | @pidoubleg


How do physical, constructed public and semi-public places intersect with online spaces
through mobile device use? What forms of sociability might support relations among
strangers in a mobile, hyperconnected culture? What implications does this have for rhetoric?

A scene from field research:
Sal reflects on his activity in the Technology Commons: I browsed Reddit, texted a couple of
people, ignored a call, and listened to the people in front of me talk a lot about Reddit.
Browsing through viral image after viral image, Sal was not paying particular attention to what
was on his screen. It did not require that much attention. As he enacted this habitual on-screen
movement, Sal was also listening to other people in the space.
As the group in front of Sal took its own conversational cues from perusing Reddit together, he
played along quietly on his laptop: he listened and winced, his face physically reacting to their
conversation, as he scrolled down the same links.

Reflections on a scene:
I offer the term ambient sociability to describe an emergent form of public interaction among
people, places, and technology that creates a contemporary social scene that sets third places
apart from both the eighteenth-century-British model of coffeehouse sociability grounded in
print circulation and conversation and the Starbucks sociability theorists such as Markman
Ellis have associated with isolation and blind consumption in non-places.
I suggest that theorists seeking to understand publicness in a social media age should attend
not only to the temporality of online circulation or to the materiality of built environments, but
also to whether and how online discourse is made persistent and memorable in material
places and leveraged as an actor that generates offline social contact.
Sal describes an emerging ethic in which meaningful or authentic interactions are those that
happen outside existing peer networks because those relationships are so heavily subject to
the surveillance and influence of networked systems. Sal gravitates toward both online and
offline social contexts that purposefully position him among strangers and their information.
Social media use is not isolatable to virtual places: it works itself temporally and spatially
through everyday life precisely because it is both incremental and continual.

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