Futures in mobile communication research: Introduction to the special issue

Abstract

Mobile communication’s embedding throughout social life has generated new directions in research and theory to understand changes in how people engage with others, the physical environment, and media content. As an early home for mobile communication research, New Media & Society is well-positioned to host this special issue, including eight articles themed around Futures in Mobile Communication Research. Although diverse in research traditions, the articles come together to reflect a shared historical influence as well as coherent themes around theory, methods, and ethics to help guide these and other futures in mobile communication research.

In recent decades, mobile communication has become central to how people navigate and experience everyday social life. As mobile telephony diffused globally in the 1990s, scholars began investigating changes in how people relate to distant and proximal others, as well as their physical surroundings. In the years since, different streams of research, theoretical traditions, and methodologies have fueled a field of scholarship with a fertile history for shaping the future of mobile communication research. New Media & Society was early in providing space for this research to develop, making this venue well-positioned for hosting this forward-looking special issue.

Looking back to look forward

While looking forward to futures in mobile communication research, we recognize this also as a time for looking back at how this area of scholarship developed. Among other early seeds (e.g. Rakow and Navarro, 1993), the history has been traced to a consortium assembled in 1993 to study “The Future European Telecommunications User” (European Commission, 1993). That project helped lay foundations for scholarship by pursuing early questions of materiality (function, frequency, duration), sociality (with whom), spatiality (where), exclusion (technological and social), and other implications of mobile phones at the individual and cultural levels. This early network of collaborators, inspired by an interdisciplinary perspective, included telecoms representatives and scholars involved in research on information and communication technologies. The European Commission was interested in creating a circuit of knowledge-sharing between industry and the academy to encourage people to collaborate around the social uses and implications of mobile telephony as it developed and diffused.

Among this network was Rich Ling, a sociologist with one foot in industry and the other in academia, who would become a key figure for the development of mobile communication scholarship. Throughout his career as a researcher with Norway’s Telenor Group and a faculty member at universities around the world, Rich Ling has contributed much to the growth in this area, evidenced throughout this collection of forward-looking articles. In light of his retirement as an academic professor, most recently at Nanyang Technological University, this special issue pays tribute to his many contributions as we look to the future of mobile communication research. Although more of a woodworker than a professor these days, Rich Ling remains active in the field as a scholar and editor. So, this tribute does not consign Ling to history, but rather recognizes his influence as an ongoing bridge between the histories and futures of scholarship in this area.

Rich Ling wrote the first single-authored book on the social consequences of mobile communication, The Mobile Connection: The Cell Phone’s Impact on Society (Ling, 2004), which remains one of the most heavily cited volumes on the subject. His second book, New Tech, New Ties: How Mobile Communication is Reshaping Social Cohesion (Ling, 2008) reveals how ritualistic use of mobile media facilitates cohesion in the intimate sphere of friends and family. Ling extended this analysis in his subsequent book, Taken for Grantedness (Ling, 2012), which offers a theoretical framework explaining how mobile communication has become embedded in the social structure. Along with these and other books, Ling has also published hundreds of journal articles, book chapters, and industry/policy reports on the uses and consequences of mobile media and communication. In addition to his own scholarship, Rich Ling’s influence in the field is evident through his leadership, serving as editor of many volumes, editor of Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, and founding co-editor of the journal Mobile Media and Communication. He was instrumental in creating the International Communication Association (ICA) Mobile Communication Division, and the series of Mobile Communication pre-conferences, a tradition spanning more than 20 years. We also recognize Ling for being a generous mentor, providing opportunities for collaboration and new generations of scholars to become active in the field. His many and various contributions have a wide reach, shaping not only the past, but also strongly influencing the future of mobile communication scholarship, as we see in this issue.

The collection of articles in this issue demonstrates Ling’s impact, while using it as a foundation for considering the future of mobile communication research. In fact, some in this collection engage deeply with Ling’s foundational work to explicitly bring it into conversation with future directions. This point is well-illustrated in the first article, Christina Neumayer and Miguel Sicart’s “Probably not a Game: Playing with the AI in the Ritual of Taking Pictures on the Mobile Phone.” Heavily drawing from Ling’s (2008) work on mobile-mediated ritual interaction, Neumayer and Sicart uncover ways that algorithmic processes occurring in the background can support anti-ritual conditions of sociality. Their analysis helps make visible the oftentimes invisible dynamics of AI-mediated sociality, while also highlighting the need to look at what is happening beyond the palm of the hand in the enactment of mobile-mediated rituals and the social cohesion they foster. Ling’s (2008) discoveries of mobile-mediated ritual interaction were derived from research in the pre-smartphone era and are therefore rooted in playful texting practices. “Probably not a Game” revisits his propositions about their development in the context of photo-sharing apps, while highlighting the formative role that AI can play in shaping mobile-mediated rituals, sometimes in disruptive ways.

To some extent, each of the articles in this collection does the type of intellectual work we see in Neumayer and Sicart’s effort to extend foundations Ling has helped lay into the future of mobile communication research. Beyond this introduction, this issue presents a total of eight articles offering direction for the future in this area of scholarship. We introduce the rest of them as they coalesce into thematic directions that speak of the challenges and opportunities facing scholarship in this area as it continues to grow and evolve.

Looking forward: theoretical, methodological, and ethical directions

The articles in this issue reflect a balanced mix of disciplinary, epistemological, theoretical, and methodological traditions. We welcome the diversity, but it is not by editorial design. Rather, it is a reflection of the many different points of entry into this area of scholarship. At the same time, the articles reflect a shared history, providing a basis for looking forward in ways that are grounded and intersecting. We assemble the rest of the articles into themes that help inform the future of mobile communication research, providing direction for theory, methods, and ethical grounding moving forward. In the concluding article, Kathleen Cumiskey and Lee Humphreys offer further synthesis of the collection, helping to translate themes into a vision for this area of scholarship that is just and open.

Theoretical directions: now that mobile communication is embedded, what’s next?

Among the various theoretical underpinnings and contributions in the articles, one that runs notably across them is the embedding of mobile communication as a taken-for-granted part of everyday life. Ling’s (2012) book on the subject unpacks discernible stages and developments in mobile communication’s journey from new and revolutionary to deeply embedded and mundane, like mechanical timekeeping. Ling calls attention to how mobile communication’s diffusion, legitimation, and appropriation have changed the social ecology, ultimately heightening expectations for accessibility in ways that are now fundamentally part of the social structure. The book offers a framework for understanding and studying the taken for grantedness of mobile communication as an overall practice and possibility, recognizing how it uniquely makes people individually addressable between and beyond places. Several articles in this volume reflect the influence Ling’s propositions of embedding have had on scholarship in this area, offering theoretical coherence to this issue and the literature more broadly. Articles in this issue draw from the history of embedding, while pushing it into fresh theoretical territory by reexamining it in dynamic new ways.

For example, in their study of “mHealth and Social Mediation,” Ellie Yang, Dhavan Shah, and their team of co-authors leverage the embedding perspective to examine how reciprocity in usage of an application can offer recovery benefits for people living with HIV and substance abuse disorder. Using digital trace data, the authors examine how dyadic, group, and intrapersonal communication through the app predict recovery outcomes, while accounting for important contextual aspects, such as intensity and initiation levels of app use. The findings highlight ways that engagement with the app can translate into recovery benefits, while showing how elements of Ling’s embedding, such as reciprocal expectations for typified use, can be foregrounded and applied in particular contexts and among certain subsets of users, complementing Ling’s societal perspective. As we return to it in the next section, the authors’ use of digital traces also reflects a broader methodological direction toward better capturing the little moments that can add up to big data.

Morgan Ross, Joe Bayer, Lisa Rhee, Ivory Potti, and Yung-Ju Chang also take up propositions from Ling’s (2012) Taken for Grantedness in their article, “Tracking the Temporal Flows of Mobile Communication in Daily Life.” Using mobile log data and experience sampling, the authors examine whether mobile communication shapes how people experience time. Whereas Ling compares the paths of mobile communication and mechanical timekeeping as they became socially embedded, Ross et al. recognize their intersectional nature, highlighting how mobile media have become a primary means for both spending and tracking time. Contrary to popular assumptions that mobile communication fosters perceptions of time acceleration, the authors find evidence that certain uses of mobile media, particularly for social media, can slow down the experience of time, at least in the short term. Aside from addressing an important question, the study highlights how paths of technological embedding can intersect and shape one another, pointing to a future direction as mobile media and communication become more integrated with other technological systems. As with Yang et al.’s study above, we will return to the methods in the Ross et al. study, as they not only reflect an effort to overcome and capture the taken for grantedness of mobile communication, but also a broader direction in data collection and analysis (presently) giving shape to (the future of) mobile communication research.

Chris Ingraham and Justin Grandinetti explore “The Privilege of Taken for Grantedness” using TikTok as a case study to address the inherent precarity in mobile media. Their definition of precarity is not in line with traditional views of the digital divide, which address lack of access to technology. Instead, they focus on the inherent properties of mobile media and the precarities that come already built-in to any normalized reliance upon them. To illustrate, they analyze a moment when several countries threatened to take TikTok offline in 2020 and millions of users around the globe were on the verge of suddenly losing access to a platform that was already ingrained in their everyday lives. The authors start from Ling’s (2012) notion of taken for grantedness, that when technologies of social mediation (cars, clocks, mobile phones) become embedded into everyday lives they “disappear” from peoples’ concerns and they no longer pay attention to them. However, once people take a technology for granted, they deeply rely on it and, as Ingraham and Grandinetti argue, their very reliance on them makes people more vulnerable to their loss. People develop emotional attachments to their mobile technologies and expect they will work as intended. When that trust and reliance is broken, they become utterly visible. This point resonates with Arul Chib, Ang Ming Wei, and Marije Geldof’s study of mobile media’s embedding among Syrian refugees, also in this issue.

Chib et al.’s article, “Dispositions of Dis/Trust: Fourth Wave Mobile Communication for a World in Flux,” places renewed emphasis on trust and how central it is in explaining mobile communication’s embedding outside of traditional notions of mundanity and everyday life. Drawing from interviews with Syrian refugees, the authors show how mobile communication helps overcome social precarity and facilitate mundane moments that would otherwise be taken for granted, resonating with Ingraham and Grandinetti’s point about it being privileged by conditions of social power. Chib and co-authors pull from Ling’s propositions of embedding, pointing to a space where trust can and should be foregrounded in the framework. The authors make a broader call for the centrality of trust in mobile communication research, while highlighting how trust interacts with social vulnerability in important and dynamic ways, generating heuristics for future research.

Collectively, the articles above point to and help inform future directions for research influenced by the embedding/taken for grantedness perspective, which itself has become embedded in scholarship. They show how the dynamics of embedding play out in a much wider and more diversified mobile media landscape than originally considered. Whereas Ling (2012) offers a societal perspective of embedding, this issue offers movement toward extending it to certain groups and expanded media usage conditions, with emphasis on precarity as an important part of the social and technological contexts.

Methodological directions: little moments, big data

As noted, articles in this special issue also coalesce in ways that help identify and inform future directions on the methodological front. There is a particular emphasis on capturing the little moments that comprise everyday life, which are important but also fleeting in nature, and therefore also in memory. These articles represent methodological movements, particularly with experience sampling and digital trace data, that help offer more fine-grained insight into the meanings, uses, and consequences of mobile media throughout daily life. Movement in this direction is evident in two of the articles previewed above by Yang et al. and Ross et al. Those studies show how digital trace data and experience sampling can help fill in the seams between other points of data collection, a theme that is furthered in the articles introduced below.

Recognizing the early emergence and recent rise of mobile experience sample methods (MESM), Lukas Otto and Sanne Kruikemeier help lay a foundation for future direction in their article “The Smartphone as a Tool for Mobile Communication Research: Assessing Mobile Campaign Perceptions and Effects with Experience Sampling.” The article highlights how MESM, involving intermittent reports from users, help in capturing the little moments by prompting periodic reflections, which is useful for fine-grained examination of embedding. Otto and Kruikemeier offer guidance by showing how MESM, along with digital traces, help address (but not entirely overcome) challenges of studying mobile communication, including self-report error, targeted and personalized mobile content, proprietary platforms and devices, and the fleeting nature of mobile media engagement. Through the case of mobile campaigning in the Dutch 2001 national election, they show how the integration of MESM with other tools, including GPS, screenshots, and sensory data, can be a useful strategy for addressing the distinctive challenges of doing mobile communication research.

In their article, “Digital Exhaust and Mobile Communication Scholarship: Pursuing the Ling Connection,” Wenche Nag, Johannes Bjelland, Geoffrey Canright, and Kenth Engø-Monsen characterize data that are traced, logged, and donated as digital “exhaust.” While this may sound harrowing, the authors offer a framework to harness these data for good. The exhaust produced by telecom providers, constituted mainly by metadata on calls, texts, app sessions, and location, identifies and documents patterns of social behavior. Nag et al. engage to find ways to use these data for the common good, although they are very aware of the limitations and sensitivities in terms of privacy, representativeness, and cost, as well as the epistemological issues that working with digital exhaust opens up. While recognizing Rich Ling’s innovation and leadership in harnessing metadata from network providers, the authors point to important developments, such as the example of Telenor Norway, which has produced aggregated mobility data to chart travel patterns for solving practical problems during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors stress the need for cross-fertilization among disciplines and industries to harness the exhaust produced by mobile communication in ways that are open and just, which are points of elaboration in the final(e) piece.

In their concluding article, “Seamless, Just, and Open: Advancing Mobile Communication Research,” Kathleen Cumiskey and Lee Humphreys position the themes highlighted above as part of a future direction they characterize as seamless. The authors point out that as mobile communication becomes more embedded, mobile media become less detectable, making users less aware and scholars more challenged in capturing moments that might be fleeting and mundane, but no less meaningful. As the authors explain, advances in measuring small-scale moments that add up to big data can help uncover the embedded ways in which the technology learns about us. They highlight the need for a strong core of ethics to steer this direction in methods, as it is also capable of supporting efforts to limit democracy and human rights.

Ethical directions: toward a more inclusive and just future

Cumiskey and Humphreys offer a vision of the future of mobile communication that is not only seamless, but also open and just. Their vision for openness stresses the ideal of inclusivity, particularly of scholars and people whose voices have traditionally been on the margins. They point out that greater inclusivity supports a future that is also more just, where mobile communication scholarship has the capacity to not only study marginality and vulnerability, but also inform and shape the policies that support and suppress them.

Chib et al.’s study of “Dispositions of Dis/Trust” among Syrian refugees demonstrates utility in foregrounding marginality, showing how routine and mundane uses of mobile media remain central even under refugee conditions, but also suppressed by the vulnerabilities and uncertainties of those conditions. Their study suggests there are universal aspects of mobile communication’s embedding, but that they play out very differently for people in vulnerable circumstances, helping guide future scholarship with an interest in mobile communication and everyday life to be more inclusive of marginalized communities and marginalizing conditions.

This point is bolstered by Yang et al.’s “mHealth and Social Mediation” study of a community of app users living with HIV and substance abuse disorder. Their study examines how aspects of embedding can manifest and become important for vulnerable groups, but that it can take both individual and community effort. They engage with reciprocity as a core component of embedding, showing how important it is in generating support for recovery among this vulnerable group. Chib et al.’s study shows that reciprocity is heavily conditioned by trust, which is heavily conditioned by the vulnerabilities and uncertainties faced in daily life. Together, the articles show that placing greater focus on marginality can help advance the ethic of inclusion, while also generating theoretical enrichment.

Mobile data science also stands out as a prominent area for ethical steering as it continues to take root in this area of scholarship. Echoing calls above for an open and just future, Nag et al. argue (in this issue) that “cross-disciplinary engagement with the aim of research for the social good would require that the commercial actors become more open and transparent about the data collection and utilization than what has been the case until now.” The authors evidence how gathering, sharing, and analyzing big data from mobile communication traces can be used to predict epidemics, infer poverty, and help solve practical problems during catastrophes. They assert that for steering toward these and other applications of “social good,” a shared ethical orientation toward openness and justice must be baked into the DNA of collaborations and projects. The opportunities for abuse are also well-recognized in this and other articles in this issue, highlighting the need for ethical steering as the future of mobile data science unfolds.

Collectively, the articles in this issue help identify ideals that can populate the ethical core of mobile communication research as it moves into a future presenting a mix of old and new possibilities and challenges. Just as it offers theoretical and methodological direction, this special issue contains guidance for moving forward in ethically informed ways. By envisioning, in some cases demonstrating, a future that is more inclusive and just, it offers direction that can enrich the field’s advancements in theory and methods, and beyond.