“Merolyn the Phone”: A Study of Bluetooth Naming Practices (Nominated for the Best Paper Award)

Abstract

This paper reports the results of an in-depth study of Bluetooth naming practices which took place in the UK in August 2006. There is a significant culture of giving Bluetooth names to mobile phones in the UK, and this paper’s main contribution is to provide an account of those Bluetooth naming practices, putting them in their social, physical and intentional context. The paper also uncovers how users have appropriated the ways in which Bluetooth, with its relatively short range of about 10-100m, operates between their mobile phones as a partially embodied medium, making it a distinctive paradigm of socially and physically embedded communication.