Mobile Media Technologies Research Articles

Is availability pressure always detrimental? From availability pressure to relationship satisfaction through compulsive checking of smartphone and need satisfaction

ABSTRACT The pervasive connectivity created by mobile media technology has resulted in availability pressure, an external pressure that requires individuals to be permanently online and permanently connected. Grounded in the socio-cognitive model of connection (SMC) and the Integrative Model of Mobile Media Use and Need Experiences (IM3UNE) frameworks, this study examines the pathways through which availability pressure influences relationship satisfaction. The findings reveal a dual effect of availability pressure: it can lead to compulsive checking, where the subsequent decline of online communication quality diminishes relationship satisfaction. Simultaneously, availability pressure fulfils three intrinsic needs, among which relatedness and autonomy heighten relationship satisfaction. Furthermore, by bridging these two models, this study demonstrates that need satisfaction can facilitate the process of internalising availability pressure and externalising it as compulsive checking of smartphones.

The Influence of Short Video on Consumer Consumption Behavior under the Perspective of Impulsive Consumption

Nowadays, the rapid development of mobile media technology causes short videos to become one of the most useful media. Short videos not only provide interesting daily life sharing but also contain lots of product merchandising. This type of merchandising always makes people appear the impulse consumption behavior. Therefore, we started researching the effect short videos have on consumers' consumption behavior under the impulsive consumption perspective. Based on this article, we give a detailed concept explanation of impulsive consumption, merchandising, and the SOR model we used in the following research. Besides, we also define the short videos. Then, we analyze the reasons short videos stimulate people's impulse consumption behavior using the SOR method, the factors that affect consumers consumption behavior, and the situational factors that affect consumers behavior. We compare the difference between offline stores promoting strategies and online promoting strategies in short videos, and analyze the cause of those factors using the SOR model. As a consequence, we find out that those factors we listed can explain the influence short videos bring to consumer consumption behavior.

Wearable witnesses: Deathlogging and framing wearable technology data in “Fitbit murders”

Wearable self-tracking devices such as Fitbit and Apple Watch have begun to be featured in high-profile criminal cases such as murder trials for the ways the data from these devices supposedly give access to objective truths about a victim's physiological state and time of death. Drawing from the concepts of deathlogging and datafication, we argue that an examination of media framing around wearables in criminal investigations and court rooms helps demonstrate how technologies become connected to different domains and practices. A discourse analysis of five case studies and 57 news stories showed how the framing of wearables in this context emphasized both enchantment with the capacity for datafication to witness, as well as contestation around how to define and interpret this witnessing. This study demonstrated how reporting around the incorporation of mobile media technologies into institutional practices often reproduced desires for digital technologies to provide access to “the truth” of social reality.

FROM “TEXT FOR LOCATION” TO “NO PHONE ON THE DANCE FLOOR”: NEGOTIATING VISIBILITY IN UNDERGROUND ELECTRONIC/DANCE MUSIC

The mediation of mobile and social media technologies has reshaped how people imagine, understand, and, in turn, calibrate the visibility of their self-expression, information sharing, and relationship-building. This paper presents a case study of how promoters and attendees in underground electronic/dance music culture (EDMC) maintained the boundaries of the “underground” by co-constructing norms of mobile and social media use. Drawing upon 20 nights of field observations at live music events and 27 semi-structured interviews with promoters and attendees, I highlighted two scenarios in which promoters and attendees leveraged the spatial and temporal affordances of mobile and social media to calibrate their visibility. First, the last-minute and indirect sharing of event location afforded the community to bar outsiders from entering while allowing insiders to authenticate themselves by navigating to their gatherings. Second, the dialectical shaping between promoters’ venue policies and attendees’ folk theories of phone etiquette maintained a reduced level of mobile media use at such gatherings. These practices brought to light how mobile and social media afford new spatial-temporal conditions of visibility and bring forth new possibilities for people to not only manage – but play with visibility.

Mobile Belonging in Digital Exile: Methodological Reflection on Doing Ethnography on (Social) Media Practices

Life in exile presents hardship and brings with it multiple personal and socio-political challenges and grievances. Being forced into separation from family and home society often stimulates the desire to maintain belonging and contact with families and communities. “Co-presence” and “being there” require a lot of personal effort and commitment. Communication and mediation strategies have a special significance as everyday practices in social and digital media technologies. “Mobile belonging” and staying connected across various online and offline spaces and in various social and political environments and communities can be a constant requirement in digital exile. After an introduction to relevant literature about the complexity of media communication, belonging, and migration, the article examines mobile media technologies and the central role they play in everyday exile. Following a discussion about the notion of “digital exile” and “mobile belonging,” the second part of the article will focus on a specific case study of an Iranian artist and activist living in exile in Germany. It will show how (social) media promotes activism and performance in both online and offline public spaces as practices of “mobile belonging here and there” during the Covid-19 pandemic. Thirdly, the article will turn to a methodological reflection about doing ethnographic research on digital exile and practices of mobile belonging. With a systematic description of applied methods, early developments in multi-modal ethnography will be outlined that illustrate how collaboration and co-creation promise innovative directions for doing ethnography on digital exile in the different-yet-shared times of the pandemic crisis.

Design and Production of Visual Image of Print Advertisement Based on Mobile Media

With the rapid development of science and technology, various fields (such as information and multimedia) have been combined with each other into a complete field of print advertising design. The visual image is the main part of showing the expressive power of graphic advertising, which intuitively explains the design creativity of the advertisement. It uses visual expression to attract the audience’s first attention and stimulate consumer emotions. However, with the continuous change of people’s aesthetic art and aesthetic needs, ordinary print advertisements can no longer meet the needs of consumers. The continuous development of science and technology has promoted the spread of mobile media. Mobile media applications not only integrate with people’s daily life but also bring people various mobile media advertisements. It realizes the multimedia and diversification of advertising. To meet the ever-changing visual aesthetic needs of users, it is necessary to use mobile media technology to innovate the visual image of print advertisements and provide consumers with a unique visual experience. Therefore, this paper will study the design and production of print advertisement visual image based on mobile media. This paper takes the design process of mobile media as the research process and summarizes the visual image design method of print advertising that meets the needs of users, conforms to the development of the times and aesthetic trends, and has high cultural information dissemination efficiency. It then tests the proposed theoretical method through the comparison of works and finally realizes the second leap of design theory. Experiments show that the visual image of mobile media advertising is more in line with consumers’ aesthetics and can increase product sales. The highest sales of its products increased by 9.26% compared with ordinary products.

Cycles of Needs and Wants: Entrepreneurial Journalism in Pakistan

Technological convergence has created an opportunity for journalists to navigate through the consequential media convergence and create their individual space in the market economy. New digital technology helps individuals to produce and broadcast different types of content encouraging varieties of entrepreneurial journalism. This study aims to explore the reasons and practices of digital entrepreneurial journalism in Pakistan and the role of mobile media technology nowadays. For this purpose, we conducted interviews with 30 entrepreneurs who are running their YouTube news channels. It was revealed that the layoffs of journalists from the media industry along with the filtering and priming of news by media conglomerates contributed to journalists looking for alternatives. Data collected about the role of smartphone technology disclosed that media convergence has made smartphones a primary and affordable means to reach the singular mega platform for information dissemination. Various smart applications provide economical broadcasting techniques to reach multiple online platforms. This research further exposes entrepreneurial journalism as an emerging need of Pakistani journalism rather than just an opportunity due to the possession of freedom of expression and economic independence.

THE IN(TER)DEPENDENCIES OF MOBILE ONLINE AND OFFLINE SPACES: REFLECTIONS ON METHODS, PRACTICES, ETHICS

Mobile media technologies place users in digital (online) as well as physical (offline) spaces in novel ways, opening up new environments of affordances. In everyday life these mobile online and offline spaces are increasingly interdependent and interwoven in manifold ways. Practices, experiences, meanings and expectations are negotiated across these spaces, while at the same time they are bound by the respective logics and limitations, leading to new interrelations and contradictions. The mobile, interlocking but non-converging nature of these spaces involves issues of access and power in struggles over in(ter)dependencies and leads to significant method(odolog)ical, practical and ethical challenges for researchers, to which the current COVID-19 pandemic only adds complexity. Researchers are confronted with questions such as: What are appropriate designs to study mobile online and offline spaces and their intersections? Do interdependent spaces call for likewise interdependent methodological approaches? In what ways can elaborated mixed and multi-method designs capture complexity adequately without the researchers losing sight of the specifics? And what are the ethical and practical implications for the parties involved? Meanwhile, in the methodological literature, the specific challenges associated with researching the intersections of online and offline spaces, especially under mobile conditions, are rarely explicitly addressed. For this reason, the panel presents a thought-provoking range of five examples of research into phenomena at the intersections of mobile online and offline spaces and the associated experiences as well as methodological challenges of researchers in dealing with issues of in(ter)dependence at all levels.

Secure Data Sharing Platform for Portable Social Networks with Power Saving Operation

Several subscribing and content sharing services are largely personalized with the growing use of mobile social media technology. The end user privacy in terms of social relationships, interests and identities as well as shared content confidentiality are some of the privacy concerns in such services. The content is provided with fine-grained access control with the help of attribute-based encryption (ABE) in existing work. Decryption of privacy preserving content suffers high consumption of energy and data leakage to unauthorized people is faced when mobile social networks share privacy preserving data. In the mobile social networks, a secure proxy decryption model with enhanced publishing and subscribing scheme is presented in this paper as a solution to the aforementioned issues. The user credentials and data confidentiality are protected by access control techniques that work on privacy preserving in a self-contained manner. Keyword search based public-key encryption with ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption is used in this model. At the end users, ciphertext decryption is performed to reduce the energy consumption by the secure proxy decryption scheme. The effectiveness and efficiency of the privacy preservation model is observed from the experimental results.

Information technology and the optimisation of experience – The role of mobile devices and social media in human-nature interactions

Information technologies have seeped their way into every aspect of our lives, mediating interactions between ourselves and our environments. They are becoming an important part of human-nature interactions, with smartphones, their apps and social media offering new ways to plan, navigate and share experiences. This article explores the changes that these mobile media technologies bring to human-nature interactions, focusing on the outdoor practices of experienced outdoor users. Drawing on observational and interview data gathered in the Scottish Highlands, we analysed hillwalkers’, mountain bikers’ and nature photographers’ interactions with mobile media technology. Using social practice theory and the idea of technologies as ‘scripts’, we found that the increased availability of information reportedly enhanced access to, confidence in and knowledge about outdoor practices. Participants negotiated the use of devices within social norms of good practice, but generally showed enthusiasm for the ever-increasing access to information. The easy access to information and the ability to share one’s performance, inscripted in the technology, guided the participants to optimise their experience. Paradoxically, this optimisation seemed to reduce the likelihood of encountering unanticipated situations that would have made their experience memorable, something our participants had previusly identified as an important aspect of their outdoor activities. Our findings illustrate the value of an in-depth empirical understanding of lived experiences, revealing how interactions between technological scripts, personal agency and social norms amplify some aspects of human-nature interactions while attenuating others. Although incremental, these changes fundamentally alter the character of our experience of nature.

Identifying associations between mobile social media users’ perceived values, attitude, satisfaction, and eWOM engagement: The moderating role of affective factors

Recently, the explosive growth of mobile social media technologies has dramatically transformed individuals’ interpersonal interaction, decision-making, and daily lifestyles. The primary objectives of this current article are to investigate the possible influences of perceived values (hedonic and utilitarian) on WeChat users’ affective responses (attitude and satisfaction) and electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) engagement. This study represents one of the few that utilized customer-perceived value theory and uses and gratifications theory to establish a conceptual framework to determine consumers’ word-of-mouth behaviors in the WeChat setting. Based on a web-based survey of 408 WeChat users, structure equation modeling was implemented to identify and confirm the hypothesized research model. Overall, the results reveal that hedonic value and utilitarian value positively and significantly impact WeChat users’ attitudes and anticipated satisfaction. Additionally, satisfaction has a significant influence on eWOM engagement. Furthermore, utilitarian value is discovered to exert a significant indirect effect through satisfaction on eWOM engagement. The obtained outcomes offer fresh insight into whether and how mobile social media could promote mobile social media users’ attitudes and gratification which subsequently would facilitate indicators of eWOM engagement in contemporary mobile-mediated context.

Investigation on the Mitigation of Suicidal Thoughts in the Elderly Depending on Mobile Media Technology and Living Arrangement

Investigation on the Mitigation of Suicidal Thoughts in the Elderly Depending on Mobile Media Technology and Living Arrangement

Educational affordances of mobile social media for language teaching and learning: a chinese teacher’s perspective

The educational potential of mobile and social media technologies in combination is becoming increasingly salient with the advance of modern technology. However, there is a dearth in the research on educational use of mobile social media for language learning. This study adopted a qualitative single case study approach to investigate a language teacher’s integration of mobile social media in the context of higher education in mainland China, with the aim of exploring educational affordances of mobile social media for language teaching and learning and understanding the relationship between the teacher’s technology use and her private theories about technology integration. Data were collected from observation, interviews, as well as documents and artifacts provided by the teacher. Qualitative content analysis was conducted to analyze the data. Five educational affordances of mobile social media emerged from the results, including a motivating environment, resources accessing and sharing, evaluation and feedback offering, administration for learning, and content generation. Results also showed that the teacher’s private theories about technology integration changed with her adoption of these affordances. However, such changes did not lead to student-centered technology-based learning designs. Implications for teachers as well as teacher educators are provided. Directions for future research are suggested.

(Im)mobile precarity in the Asia-Pacific

ABSTRACTIf on a global scale, our late-modern era is marked by intensifying mobilities of many kinds, then Asia as a geo-cultural region exemplifies this trend in particularly forceful ways, with large mobile populations including permanent migrants, refugees, international students, labour migrants, young travelers, as well as well-developed cross-border networks of mobile media technologies, products, talents, and finances. Our starting point in this article is the idea that these intensified mobilities sketched are transforming people’s experiences of everyday life and subjectivity in Asia and beyond. The increased regionwide ‘mobilisation’ of economic, social and cultural life seems likely to transform people’s senses of place and movement; experiences of labour; everyday affective and embodied sense of self; gendered, sexed, raced and classed subjectivities; visual and media cultures; youth cultures; cultures of consumption, and more. This raises a plethora of theoretical and empirical questions for a regionally focussed cultural studies. How frictionless are these intensifying flows: which borders and blockages mould the new, transnational experiential geographies that are taking shape? Which populations are advantaged by increased mobility, and which minoritised? What new inequalities emerge as a result of intensifying mobilities – and how do people live with, resist, and creatively negotiate these inequalities at the micro-level of everyday practice? And what will ‘Asia’ come to mean in the emergent reconfigurations of place, geography and identity being wrought by intensifying mobilities? In order to lay the conceptual groundwork for the special issue, this article begins by tracing the interconnections between three of our key terms – (im)mobilities, precarities, and borders – in conversation with the relevant theoretical scholarship on these concepts across a range of disciplinary fields. This leads to the theorisation of a new concept that articulates these connections: (im)mobile precarity.

Multitasking as multisensory behavior: Revisiting media multitasking in the perspective of media ecology theory

Media multitasking has become an inseparable part of the media routine for many Internet users as it is being retribalized, as a multisensory computer-mediated behavior, in the mobile media age. Guided by McLuhan's media ecology theory, this study examined the hierarchical relationships between media multitasking and media generations, mobile media use, and need for cognition among users in the United States and China (N = 1,340). After gender was controlled, media generations (defined as those growing up with or without the pervasive use of mobile media) was directly associated with media multitasking. Moreover, mobile media power use mediated the relationship between media generations and media multitasking. The personality construct of need for cognition was also found to play a critical role in performing multitasking. These findings indicate that mobile media technologies are reactivating multiple human senses in multitaskers, which might be a result of the evolutionary process spearheaded by the ubiquity of mobile media technologies. Thus, it is high time to revisit media multitasking as a new normal and access it as a multisensory behavior. McLuhan's media ecology theory helps understand the evolution of media multitasking, which may no longer be as simple as a technology distraction to users.

Redefining Writing for the Responsive Workplace

In this article we argue that mobile, design, content, and social media technologies have fundamentally redefined the role of the writer in the workplace. Rather than the originator of content, the writer is becoming a sort of multimodal editor who revises, redesigns, remediates, and upcycles content into new forms, for new audiences, purposes, and media. This article discusses data gathered from over one hundred hours of embedded workplace research shadowing nine different professional communicators. The data demonstrate the iterative, detailed, product-focused types of work happening within a range of workplace constraints and, in turn, emphasize the need for writers and teachers of writing to recognize the importance of developing a broad skillset to prepare for this kind of work.

The unchallenged persuasions of mobile media technology

In recent years, networked devices have taken an ever tighter hold of people’s everyday lives. The tech companies are frantically competing to grab people’s attention and secure a place in their daily routines. In this short paper, I elaborat further a key finding from an analysis of Finnish press coverage on Google Glass between 2012 and 2015. The concept of pre-domestication is used to discuss the ways in which we are invited and persuaded by the media discourse to integrate ourselves in the carefully orchestrated digital environment. It is shown how the news coverage deprives potential new users of digital technology a chance to evaluate the underpinnings of the device, the attachments to data harvesting, and the practices of hooking attention. In the paper, the implications of contemporary computational imaginaries as (re)produced and circulated in the mainstream media are reflected, thereby shedding light on and opening possibilities to criticize the politics of mediated pre-domestication.

What triggers impulse purchase in Facebook commerce?

Facebook commerce or f-commerce has become a new trend in mobile commerce (m-commerce) due to the advancements in mobile communications and social media technologies. Despite a huge business potential in f-commerce, impulse purchase in f-commerce is still not well-understood. Unlike previous f-commerce studies which had focused on apparel; e-service quality; organic rice; and membership continuance intention, the current study investigated utilitarian-, hedonic-, and trust-motivations' effects on participation that influences urge to purchase and ultimately impulse purchase. The effects of the personality trait of urgency towards urge to purchase and impulse purchase were also examined. A sample of f-commerce users was selected and their responses were analysed using PLS-SEM. The model can explain 52.8%, 47.4%, 41.1% and 33.3% variance in impulse purchase, participation, urge to purchase and trust. These findings will be beneficial to the mobile commerce retailers, marketers and other f-commerce stakeholders in formulating their marketing strategies and policies.

Mad Practices and Mobilities Bringing Voices to Digital Ethnography

Abstract There is a claim that digital media technologies can give voice to the voiceless (Alper 2017). As Couldry (2008) points out it is now commonplace for people - who have never done so before - to tell, share and exchange stories within, and through digital media. Additionally, the affordances of mobile media technologies allow people to speak, virtually anytime and anywhere, while the new internet based media sees that these processes converge to allow stories, information, ideas and discourses to circulate through communicative spaces, and into the daily lives of people (Sheller/Urry 2006). The purpose of this paper is to discuss a methodological framework that can be used to examine the extent that digital media practices can enable voice. My focus is on people ascribed the status of mental illness - people who have had an enduring history of silencing and oppression (Parr 2008). I propose theories of mobilities, and practice, to critically examine voice in practices related to digital media. In doing this, I advocate for digital ethnographic methods to engage these concepts, and to examine the potential of voice in digital mobile media. Specifically, I outline ethnographic methods involving the use of video (re)enactments of digital practices, and the use of reflective interviews to examine every day routines and movements in and around digital media (Pink 2012). I propose that observing and reflecting on such activities can generate insights into the significance these activities have in giving voice to those who are normally unheard.

Factors Affecting Users' Release Behavior Intention Based on WeChat Innovation Platform

WeChat is a typical representative of mobile media technology, which changes the way people live and work. This paper explores influence factors of users' release behavior intention, from the perspective of recessive perception factors of technology acceptance and obvious factors of task technology fit based on the integration theory of Motivation Model theory (MM) and Need-Technology Fit theory (NTF). Some suggestions are put forward to improve users' behavior intention and actual behaviors, to provide the reference for the optimization of mobile social media information technology.