Digital Childhood?

Mobile devices play a growing role in the everyday lives of children around the world, prompting important questions about their effects on childhood experiences. Exploring the recent global trends in children’s use of smartphone devices, the authors examine the reconfiguring of children’s communicative practices and cultures of connectivity, documenting the opportunities and risks that smartphone technology affords. Throughout the chapter the authors challenge the notion of “digital childhoods,” drawing on the most reliable research on children and smartphones including findings from Global Kids Online, which suggest that digital divides intersect with existing social inequalities, exacerbating the barriers for less privileged children. This raises further questions about the long-term consequences for children’s development, rights, and future access to opportunities and resources.

Polymedia and Mobile Communication

This chapter identifies how the theory of polymedia is integrally linked to developments in mobile communication. The term polymedia aims to capture media as composite environments—instead of discrete technologies—which users navigate in order to manage their relationships. The popularization of internet-enabled portable devices, such as smartphones and tablets, and the parallel wide availability of wireless services have given rise to a culture of ubiquitous connectivity. Smartphones enable the accessing of a mini-ecosystem of platforms and applications while on the move. The related affordances of ubiquitous connectivity, portability, and fluidity between platforms are vital for the emergence of polymedia practices. Mobile communication developments have also contributed to improved internet access, which is one of the preconditions for polymedia practices to emerge. The theory of polymedia in turn offers a distinctive approach for understanding smartphones as mini-ecosystems in their own right and, ultimately, for understanding the micro-workings of mobile communication.

Women, Empowerment, and Mobile Phones in the Developing World

This chapter surveys and analyzes recent literature on mobile communication to examine its relationship to gender and development, more specifically how women in developing countries use and are impacted by mobile phones. Focusing on issues of power, agency, and social status, the chapter reviews how mobile telephony has been found to be implicated in patriarchal bargaining in different societies, how privacy and control are enabled through it, what benefits have been shown to accrue to women using mobile phones, and what barriers, limitations, and disadvantages of mobile use exist for women and why. The conclusion urges more gender-disaggregated analysis of mobile phone impact and use and offers policy and design recommendations based on the overview and discussion.

Autonomous Vehicles in the Mobility System

This chapter discusses how autonomous vehicles (AVs) may interact with our evolving mobility system and what they mean for mobile communication research. It juxtaposes a conceptualization of AVs as manifestations of automation and artificial intelligence with an analysis of our mobility system as a historically grown hybrid of communication and transportation technologies. Since the emergence of railroad and telegraph, this system has evolved on two layers: an underlying infrastructure to power and coordinate the movements of objects, people, and ideas in industrially scaled speeds, volumes, and complexity and an interface to seamlessly access this infrastructure and control it. AVs are poised to further enhance the seamlessness which mobile phones and cars already lent to mobility. But in assuming increasingly sophisticated control tasks, AVs also disrupt an established shift toward individual control, demanding new interfaces to enable higher levels of individual and collective control over the mobility infrastructure.

RFID, NFC, Beacons, and the Infrastructures of Logistical Locative Media

The phrase the Internet of things was originally coined in a 1999 presentation about attaching radio frequency identification (RFID) tags to individual objects. These tags would make the objects machine-readable, uniquely identifiable, and, most importantly, wirelessly communicative with infrastructure. This chapter evaluates RFID as a piece of mobile communicative infrastructure, and it examines two emerging forms: near-field communication (NFC) and Bluetooth low-energy beacons. The chapter shows how NFC and Bluetooth low-energy beacons may soon move some types of RFID to smartphones, in this way evolving the use of RFID in payment and transportation and enabling new practices of post-purchasing behaviors.

Talking, Reading, and Writing on Smartphones

Mobile phones have increasingly been transformed from speaking technologies to devices for reading and writing. Cost helped drive this shift since written short messages were historically less expensive than voice calls. A second factor was communication preference for texting over talking, especially among younger users. With ready Internet access on smartphones, reading habits began shifting as well. Social networking messages, along with other short texts such as weather reports or news headlines, made for obvious reading material, as did the plethora of longer written documents available online. The e-book revolution enabled readers to retrieve entire books on their phones. Mobile phones are also writing platforms. Developments in hardware and software dramatically simplified the input process. Instead of multi-taps, users now rely on virtual keyboards for easy access not only to alphanumeric characters and punctuation marks but also to sophisticated predictive texting and autocorrection. Interestingly, while technically we are writing when inputting text on smartphones, many users do not perceive such input as real “writing”—a term they reserve for writing by hand or with a computer. Additional writing issues include norms regarding so-called textisms, along with the role of culture in shaping attitudes regarding linguistic correctness. Many organizations are discontinuing voicemail systems in favor of written messaging. At the same time, voice over Internet protocols continue to grow, and small voice-activated social robots designed for home use are proliferating. The chapter closes by asking what the spoken–written balance on smartphones might look like in the future.

Mobile Photography

In this chapter, we examine the growth of everyday mobile-based photography. In particular, we examine nonprofessional photography in day-to-day life. We start by discussing the elements that came together to form this type of mediation, and then look at the different social formations that have developed. These include the spread of increasingly mundane expressive photos and the dramatic growth of instrumental photos. We examine people’s use of selfies, and the idea of “ad hoc curation” as a way of introducing photos into the flux of everyday social interaction. We also discuss eventual issues that are introduced by our increased access to photography such as the perpetual need to pose for the camera, the deceitful use of images, and changes in the etiquette of being photographed.

The Complexities of Using Mobiles at Work

Mobile devices have diffused into work by transitioning from being organizational assets to personal communication tools. This chapter examines the perceptions and practices of diverse types of workers, located around the globe, and reveals the often-hidden complexities surrounding mobile use at work. People can use their mobiles to be productive and connected on the job, but they also face challenges. The shift in control over communication means that organizations have reacted by creating bring-your-own-device-to-work policies, banning their employees from using personal mobiles, and practically forcing workers to provide their own devices and be accessible 24/7. Along the way, workers have had to negotiate with co-workers, managers, clients, friends, strangers, and family concerning how and when they use their mobiles. As they try to build bridges between work and personal life, struggles with self-management and temporal mismatches in the form of reachability can emerge.

Mobile Media and Political Communication

To fully understand the impact of mobile phone technology on politics, this chapter provides a state-of-the-art overview of research and identifies an emerging subfield concerning the relationship between mobile media and politics. The chapter traces the evolution of mobile media from personal communication devices to tools for political participation. The growing literature on the role of various mobile devices in civic and political life is reviewed and critiqued. The specific uses of mobile media as tools in political communication, such as informational use, mobile political news, and mobile public sphere, are explicated and synthesized. The chapter also sheds light on the question of how the attributes of mobile media influence the political process in democratic and non-democratic countries. The chapter outlines key issues concerning mobile media in civic and political communication, highlighting significant predictors and mediators. Unresolved issues and debates are highlighted, and directions for future research are suggested.

The Social Consequences of Phubbing

Recent empirical work suggests that phubbing, a term used to describe the practice of snubbing someone with a phone during a face-to-face social interaction, harms the quality of social relationships. Based on a comprehensive literature review, this chapter presents a framework that integrates three concurrent mechanisms that explain the relational impact of phubbing: expectancy violations, ostracism, and attentional conflict. Based on this framework, theoretically grounded propositions are formulated that may serve as guidelines for future research on these mechanisms, the conditions under which they operate, and a number of potential issues that need to be considered to further validate and extend the framework.