Although social media are increasingly used through mobile devices, the differences between mobile and computer-based practices remain unclear. This study attempts to tease out some of these differences through multiple analytical strategies and samples. Drawing on theoretical expectations about the affordances, motivations, and cognition of mobile use, we investigate who uses mobile Facebook, why they use it, and how they use it. To do this, we first compare those who use Facebook only on a PC with those who also use the service on mobile devices. Then, in order to quantify mobile Facebook use, we propose a new set of survey measures to tap into more and less mobile users among the sample of people who access Facebook through multiple modes. These questions serve to validate measures of mobile Facebook use, and allow us to examine how patterns of use relate to user motivations and experiences. Findings revealed important differences between PC-only and mobile users as well as a distinct and reliable measure of mobileness. Whereas motivations for Facebook use did not differ across users, more habitual and absorbing use of Facebook was strongly, positively associated with mobile practices. These findings illustrate that people use mobile Facebook in more automatic and immersive ways that are independent of overall frequency of use or motivations. Implications for the psychological mechanisms involved in mobile communication, as well as survey measurement of social media use, are discussed.
Around every new media technology debates circle about whether the technology is bringing people socially closer or pushing us further apart. According to popular press accounts, Pokémon GO players are absorbed into a game world on their phone with no attention or interest in the "real" world around them. But coupled with these accounts are stories of people exploring their neighborhoods and of marriage proposals in the midst of Pokémon hunting. This article puts Pokémon GO into a longer context of mobile technologies and sociospatial practice to explore the kinds of social interactions that can emerge around and through the use of Pokémon GO. In particular, the article explores how people can use the platform as both an involvement shield and social catalyst.
We compare here some features of the emerging uses of Pokémon GO with earlier, though less successful, location-aware collection games such as Mogi. While mobility patterns are relatively similar, Pokémon GO brings about a distinctive augmented-reality dimension to the game experience, though it does not harness the social networking power of such location-aware game platforms to the same extent as earlier games.
Most of the discussion about Pokémon Go has focused on the end-user and the playful nature of the game. Experts have mentioned the game’s commercialism, but they have done so mostly by talking about the data collection practices of the app developers. This commentary piece takes a different approach by examining how businesses have used Pokémon Go’s "lures" to attract foot traffic. The main goal of the article is to show how the ludic, digital wayfaring of location-based games can be used by individual places to attract players. While the focus is on business owners, I will also address how game mechanics could also be used to encourage prosocial behaviors such as voting (in noncompulsory voting countries).
In July 2016, Niantic Labs released the hybrid/augmented reality game Pokémon Go. Due to the game’s sudden enormous success, many mobile phone users all over the world could experience for the first time playing a hybrid reality game. Hybrid reality games, however, are not new. For at least 15 years, researchers and artists experiment with the affordances of location-based mobile technology to create playful experiences that take place across physical and digital (i.e., hybrid) spaces. Blast Theory’s Can You See Me Now?, developed in 2001, is one of the first examples. Yet for a long time, these games remained in the domain of art and research, and had therefore a very limited player community. Previous research has identified three design characteristics of hybrid reality games: mobility, sociability, and spatiality; and three main aspects to analyze these games: the connection between play and ordinary life, the relevance of the play community, and surveillance. With hybrid reality games’ commercialization and popularity, some of the issues that have been at the core of these games for over a decade will remain the same, while other aspects will change. This paper uses Pokémon Go as an example of a hybrid/augmented reality game to explore the main social and spatial issues that arise when these games become mainstream, including mobility, sociability, spatiality, and surveillance.
The appeal of Pokémon GO is in large part due to the game’s introduction of locative augmented reality to popular media culture, as players’ mobile phones summon virtual creatures and overlay them on the immediate environment. The significance of this novel device (within popular children’s culture at least) is open to question however. The workings of imagination in children’s lives have always populated mundane experience with nonactual actions and characters, and these processes have been mechanized and monetized by commercial children’s culture over decades, not least in the transmedia system of Pokémon itself. What can critical attention to imagination and technology in pre- and postdigital play tell us about the hybrid realities of Pokémon GO today?
This piece provides an explanation to the early success of Pokémon GO. It proposes an argument about how this game exemplifies a computational culture of play. By drawing on philosophy of technology (Floridi, 2013) and game design research (Montola, Stenros, & Waern, 2009), this article argues that the success of Pokémon GO is the result of the development of a play experience and a computational interface for a reality that is already augmented. These interfaces open new possibilities for digital play in public, but they also raise concerns regarding corporate appropriation of public spaces.
Even while digital games are played by millions, game cultures have remained in the margins of public life, to a certain degree. Pokémon GO is part of a new wave of phenomena that are about to change that situation. As a location-based game, it encourages people to play digital games out in the open, visiting public places. The ludic mindset and playful practices first developed while interacting with Pokémon GO may provide a basis for more complex skill sets and cultural practices that will be needed in broader cultural ludification developments, and for the next steps of entering the Ludic Society. The phenomenal success of Pokémon GO also highlights the importance of the meaningfully implemented links between technology, gaming content, and culture.
None of the elements that contribute to the phenomenon of Pokémon Go are particularly new. Augmented-reality and location-based games, artworks, and marketing campaigns have existed for well over a decade. Meanwhile, the Pokémon franchise of videogames, trading cards, comic books, and anime has existed for more than two. Even the data that Pokémon Go is built from is generated by players of Niantic’s earlier locative game, Ingress. If there is nothing "new" about the phenomenon of Pokémon Go, then what is there to learn from its rapid ascension in the cultural zeitgeist?
In this article I maintain that it is the increased ubiquity of the smartphone and its tendency to reconfigure existing media and cultural practices that has allowed the novelty of augmented reality and the nostalgia of Pokémon to converge in a perfect storm of branding, design, preexisting data, and established technologies.
Recent research has reported negative consequences, such as increased anxiety, associated with restricting people’s access to their mobile phones. These findings have led researchers to suggest that mobile phone use may pose a legitimately addictive behavior for some people. Other research has suggested negative effects of mobile phones on academic outcomes. To study the effects of phone separation on both anxiety and attainment of academic study goals, we randomly assigned participants (N = 93) to a restricted mobile phone access condition or a control condition. After setting a list of goals for a study session, participants worked on their own, self-chosen class materials for 60 minutes. Anxiety was measured before and immediately following the study session. Attainment of study goals was assessed through a self-report estimate of the percent of study goals accomplished at the end of the session. We predicted that those who classified as high on a problematic mobile phone use scale and who had their phones taken away would show the greatest increases in anxiety over the session as well as the greatest deficits in attainment of study goals as compared to all other participants. While there was a general tendency for participants who scored higher on the problematic use scale to be more anxious, anxiety did not differ between participants with phone access and those without it. Participants without phone access self-reported attainment of 12% more of their study goals than those who had phones. This study qualified the conditions for which restricting mobile phone access increases anxiety and provided further empirical support for detriments to attainment of study goals when mobile phones are present.
The emergence of location-based real-time dating (LBRTD) apps such as Tinder has introduced a new way for users to get to know potential partners nearby. The design of the apps represents a departure from "old-school" dating sites as it relies on the affordances of mobile media. This might change the way individuals portray themselves as their authentic or deceptive self. Based on survey data collected via Mechanical Turk and using structural equation modeling, we assess how Tinder users present themselves, exploring at the same time the impact of their personality characteristics, their demographics, and their motives of use. We find that self-esteem is the most important psychological predictor, fostering real self-presentation but decreasing deceptive self-presentation. The motives of use—hooking up/sex, friendship, relationship, traveling, self-validation, and entertainment—also affect the two forms of self-presentation. Demographic characteristics and psychological antecedents influence the motives for using Tinder, with gender differences being especially pronounced. Women use Tinder more for friendship and self-validation, while men use it more for hooking up/sex, traveling, and relationship seeking. We put the findings into context, discuss the limitations of our approach and provide avenues for future research into the topic.
This paper contributes to the understanding of immigrants’ mobile phone uses by focusing on a particular social group, European young adults, and moment in the migration process—arrival at a new place. It analyses the experiences of 25 Spanish-speaking young adults recently arrived in London through a qualitative methodological lens based on semistructured interviews and participant observation at relevant sites of arrival in the city. We looked at the potential mobile phones have to empower youth in their migration processes—from improving their transnational communication to accessing relevant and timely information at destination—as well as the challenges young migrants face to fully enjoy mobile services in a new national context. We argue that this tension between the potential benefits and challenges of mobile communication is particularly prominent when arriving at a new place, a moment characterized by economic and emotional uncertainties. However, this temporal dimension has tended to remain underexplored in the literature that deals with mobile communication and users’ strategies. Thus we propose the concept of "immigrants’ technological adjustments" to name the set of decisions immigrants take as information and communication technologies (ICTs) users in order to ensure the availability of digital resources and services while moving between countries. We draw upon empirical examples from fieldwork in order to offer a new conceptual tool that further develops the burgeoning field of immigrants and ICT use.
Visual aesthetics is an essential part of our experience of mobile devices, but the ways in which it is accounted for in design have largely been overlooked. We investigate whether an aesthetization of mobile design is taking place and, if so, how it is being pursued through institutional practices in organizations. We conduct a visual analysis of all Nokia phone releases between 1992 and 2013 complemented by an interview series with key actors. The study reveals a continuous increase in aesthetic variation between 1998 and 2008, which is visible in the variation of colors, forms, and materials. The period between 2003 and 2008, which we term the "Grand" period, marks the peak of aesthetization of Nokia’s devices. It exhibits great variation, and is visibly similar to aesthetics in the fashion industry. With the introduction of the slate form, we see a decrease in visual variation between 2009 and 2013. The interviews reveal how the visual design was driven by organizational strategies, such as customer segmentation in general, and an orientation toward the fashion industry, for example, in the creation of a fashion segment. The study reveals how aesthetic variation is weaved into a complex innovation system with sometimes conflicting demands deriving from, for instance, technology and user interaction.
This article investigates the early history of portable radio in the United States from 1920 through 1954. As the first mobile electronic device, the portable radio reveals important information about how the mobile media experience has developed over time. Portable radio afforded several new experiences that are relevant to today’s media landscape: it allowed users to create customizable, mobile media environments that they could take with them wherever they went; it redefined the radio listening context by allowing users to bring their preferred forms of entertainment with them when travelling to unfamiliar places; and it facilitated more continuous media consumption habits. This interdisciplinary essay combines close textual analysis of historical newspaper articles and advertisements, which are viewed through the lens of a range of media theories. The goal is to uncover some of the complex effects of early mobile media and to lay the groundwork for future in-depth studies of mobile media history.
Smartphones are finding their way into our daily lives. This paper examines the domestication of smartphones by looking at how the way we use mobile applications affects our everyday routines. Data is collected through an innovative quantitative mixed-method approach, combining log data from smartphones and survey (perception) data. We find that there are dimensions of domestication that explain how the use of smartphones affects our daily routines. Contributions are stronger for downloaded applications than for native applications. Especially applications that require interaction with others, such as social media and instant messaging, have a serious impact on our day-to-day routines. As a result, appropriation is core in incorporating smartphones in daily life routines. However, frequency of use and the total number of minutes spent on a given type of application per day affect our everyday routines in different ways. This paper is the first quantitative domestication study that focuses on smartphones rather than feature phones. The theoretical contribution and practical implications are outlined.
Mobile apps are very popular. However, this is not true for every app, with some apps receiving millions of downloads, while other apps are mostly ignored. We investigate the popularity of apps in terms of downloads by focusing on two salient cues: (a) online recommendations (e.g., presence and valence of online reviews) and (b) visual characteristics of app icons (e.g., use of visual metaphors and anthropomorphism). Study 1 was a field study in which we content-analyzed 500 apps from the "transportation" subcategory of the Google Play Store. We found that the presence and valence of online reviews, as well as the presence of visual metaphors in app icons were positively related to the number of app downloads. Study 2 was an experiment in which we presented participants with different app icons containing different types of visual metaphors. We again found that app icons with visual metaphors led to more positive attitudes towards the apps and behavioral intentions. Combined, our studies show that both online consumers (through online reviews) and app designers (through visual design) impact an app’s popularity.
This paper draws on qualitative data collected as a part of a comparative study on children and teenagers’ uses of smartphones in nine European countries to explore the meanings and emotions associated with the enhanced possibility of "full-time" contact with peers provided by smartphones. It argues that full-time access to peers—which interviewees identify as the main consequence of smartphones and instant messaging apps on their interactions with friends—is a communicative affordance, that is, a set of socially constructed opportunities and constraints that frame possibilities of action by giving rise to a diversity of communicative practices, as well as contradictory feelings among young people: intimacy, proximity, security as well as anxiety, exclusion and obligation. Understanding the perceptions and emotions around the affordance of "anywhere, anytime" accessibility, therefore, helps in untangling how communicative affordances are individually perceived but also, and more importantly, socially appropriated, negotiated, legitimised, and institutionalised.
During the last decade Samoa significantly reformed its telecommunications sector. It introduced a new competitor—Digicel—into the market, privatised the state-owned company SamoaTel (now Bluesky Samoa) and established an independent regulator. These reforms have had a dramatic impact on mobile usage in Samoa, and now mobile phones and regular Internet access have become an everyday (and affordable) reality for a vast majority of the population. This paper provides a critical account of one of the most mature mobile markets in the Pacific region. Drawing on semistructured key informant interviews with individuals in the Samoan telecommunications sector and the public service (conducted in April 2014), the paper explores the emergence of a Samoan digital culture, a transformation which has only been possible thanks to the widespread take up of mobile phones on 3G networks. We outline how mobiles are being used in Samoa, the ways in which they integrate (or don’t) with existing social and cultural norms and discuss the wider infrastructural issues that have emerged in light of this increased usage. We end by reflecting on what the Samoan experience can tell us about telecommunications reform in developing countries more generally.