Individuals are communicating with one another to an increasing extent on mobile phones, which have enabled them to carry on conversations with others from nearly wherever they are and throughout whatever they are doing during the day. Maintaining connections with others through mobile phones contributes both to a need for synchrony in communication across mobile devices as well as to perceptions of increased accessibility to others - expectations that others are available to us as needed or desired. However, feelings of accessibility to others do not always signify true, uninterrupted access to others, as individuals may be unavailable to communicate for a number of reasons or unresponsive even when available. In order to understand the meaning of response delays in mobile interaction for individuals’ sense of connectedness to others, I interviewed emerging adults to engage in discussion with interviewees about their experiences of delayed responses from communication partners, unpacking the impact these delays may or may not have had on their sense of connectedness to them. I found that our cohort’s response time expectations were heavily informed by prior communication experience with communication partners and social norms, as posited by expectancy violation theory (Burgoon, 1988), which lays out a framework for predicting antecedents to nonverbal behavior expectancies and outcomes of violations to those expectancies. Perceived availability of communication partners was another recurring, important driver of responsiveness expectations. In close dyads, it appears that availability expectations may be even more precise than they would otherwise be with other communication partners given the increased access to information they have about others’ schedules as well as the more extensive prior communication experience. With these more precise availability expectations come potentially more severe or concerning reactions to expectancy-violating response delays.The lack of a shared environmental context in mobile communication can render it impossible to know another’s true availability to respond, no matter how “fine-tuned” or precise one’s expectations of availability are. This introduced a new layer of complexity in individuals’ interpretations of response delays, especially in cases where availability of a communication partner was presumed but a response was still not received. Reactions to response time violations included emotional reactions and compensation behaviors (such as modality switching) as predicted by the expectancy violation framework. We did not observe evidence that repeated response time violations hurt relationships with primary, typically close communication partners in any detectable way to the interviewees. Most response time violations with main communication partners that were discussed with participants were forgiven, described post-hoc as excusable instances of non-response based on later-realized circumstances.Based on these interviews and our findings, I recommend future work to continue to unpack the complexity of availability, seeking to better determine the impact of misconceived notions of availability on the evaluation of response delays. I also propose that future work dig more deeply into the role of communicator reward valence on the interpretation of and reaction to response delays in mobile communication.
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