Mobile social media: The challenges and opportunities continue

Introduction

When the inaugural issue of Mobile Media and Communication (MMC) was published in 2013, I began my article with the story of the Lovegety, a stand-alone device in Japan in the late 1990s that would beep when within 5 meters of another Lovegety device on the same setting, either “chatting,” “karaoke,” or “get2” (Humphreys, 2013). This example demonstrated several important aspects of mobile social media. First, the use of a stand-alone device was out of place given the mobile phone, app-centric environment. Second, the Lovegety's connectivity was based on proximity, not locality. There were no location-based data collected on such devices. Third, the Lovegety demonstrated that mobile social media were not always tied to mobile phones. In this article, I want to reflect on what these three aspects mean for mobile social media in 2023.

When MMC first launched, it seemed unfathomable that a separate device, such as the Lovegety, would connect people rather than an app on a smartphone. Indeed from 2008–2013, there was exponential growth in apps (Goggin, 2021; Morris & Murray, 2018). Today, however, given the rise of “smart” objects and appliances, devices such as the Lovegety do not seem unusual. Plenty of things “talk” to each other (Frith, 2019). It is, however, the case that such objects or things are now also connected to our mobile devices and ultimately the Internet (Bunz & Meikle, 2017), whereas the Lovegety was not accessible through a mobile phone or the Internet. If the Lovegety were to exist today, it likely would be a device that connects to an app and mobile infrastructure. As devices that were small enough to hold in one's hand, slip in a pocket, or keep on a keychain, Lovegetys were small enough to subtly carry and even hide if someone wanted to pretend they had not matched with a nearby stranger. Twenty-five years ago, the Lovegety demonstrated the importance of materiality in mobile media.

Originally, I argued that the Lovegety demonstrated that not all mobile social media were location-based, but location in which media were produced and consumed mattered (e.g., using the Lovegety at the mall versus at work). In retrospect, I did not appreciate the Lovegety's focus on proximity. Hugh Davies (2019) research on fans also reveals the importance of proximity rather than locality in historical mobile media. In both cases of the Lovegety and fans, mobile communication occurs through the proximity of mobile objects and people. For the Lovegety much like mobile phones today, the proximity of devices typically means the proximity of people. The global COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020 begat proximity-based contact tracing apps as a vital means to “flatten the curve” of COVID-19. These apps would alert people when they had been in close proximity to another person who tested positive and put them at risk of contracting the virus. Indeed, both proximity and locality were vital to tracking the spread of COVID-19 and has given rise to important research on mobile media and the COVID-19 pandemic in MMC (Baik & Jang, 2022; Stevic et al., 2021; Yadlin & Marciano, 2021).

Ten years of dedicated mobile communication research in MMC has also demonstrated the importance of not just examining current mobile media and communication, but historical examples as well. The Lovegety was less than 10 years old when I first encountered it in the early 2000s. Recently published histories reveal that mobile technological development had other potential trajectories beyond the ones taken (Jin, 2018; Wilken, 2019). While technological development sometimes feels like an inevitable progressive path, it is not (Nye, 2007). Dal Young Jin's (2018) article on pre-smartphone Korea is a great example of how only through historical analyses can large-scale socioeconomic and technological transitions be fully understood. Historical analyses of earlier forms of mobile media such as portable radios (Cohen, 2016) and typewriting (Plotnick, 2020) in the early to mid-twentieth century, as well as personal computers (Alper, 2019) in the late twentieth century demonstrate how these historical mobile media become a helpful lens through which to understand issues of technology, intimacy, gender, portability, and space, among others. The MMC's special issue on mobile media beyond the phone demonstrates how such work revealed the layers of mobilities as the “(im)material, networked, and embodied forms of social, spatial, and temporal practices” (Frith & Özkul, 2019, p. 298). Mobile histories have become, and will continue to be, a generative lens for intellectual inquiry in MMC. Beyond just looking back at what has changed since MMC began, I want to look forward and offer a framework for thinking about opportunities and challenges for our field over the next 10 years.

Blurred boundaries of mobile social media

The boundaries of what constitute mobile social media are still challenging to articulate. “Mobile social media can loosely be considered software, applications, or services accessed through mobile devices that allow users to connect with other people and to share information, news, and content” (Humphreys, 2013, p. 21). This broad definition is largely still applicable even as technologies continue to change and evolve. The challenge in some ways is less about what falls within the category and more about what does not. Even common apps for weather, news, or shopping include “sharing” capabilities. The social aspect of mobile media has become integrated into many different kinds of services and apps that are not classified as “social media.”

The continued blurring of mobile social media, theoretically as well as empirically, is a good thing for our field. Theoretically, the blurring of what constitute mobile social media will bring new insights and deeper understandings of the social, political, cultural, mobile, and technological aspects of communication. Empirically, the blurring of the boundaries of mobile social media will bring opportunities to develop new methods as well as new sites and contexts for data collection. This, in turn, will develop and generate further theoretical insights. An expansive definition of mobile social media, rather than a narrow one, will position us well to retain relevance and expertise in the ever-changing world.

Expanding circles of inquiry

As we grow and mature as an intellectual community, I want to suggest that we continue to expand our areas of inquiry, particularly around questions of materiality, infrastructure, and policy. As a field, I think we (myself included) have largely focused on people and mobile media, which makes sense as social researchers. But expanded focus on materiality, infrastructure, and policy is warranted as each reflect ways of making and making sense of mobile media.

Early mobile research discussed the material nature of phones (e.g., Agar, 2003; Katz & Sugiyama, 2006). This shifted toward questions of affordances and features as prominent frameworks for studying the design and use of mobile media (e.g., Evans et al., 2017; Humphreys et al., 2018; Schrock, 2015). The app-walkthrough method (Light et al., 2016) has brought more attention and tools to examine the material design of apps in our field, which has been generative. But physical materiality of mobile media and communication such as hardware, batteries, accessories, and infrastructure are generally not as well-considered any more. Lievrouw (2014) offers a helpful framework for thinking about materiality and communication. In this vein, Jackson argues that breakdown, maintenance, and repair are central aspects of all technologies. Repairs are “the subtle acts of care by which order and meaning in complex sociotechnical systems are maintained and transformed, human value is preserved and extended, and the complicated work of fitting to the varied circumstances of organizations, systems, and lives is accomplished” (Jackson, 2014, p. 222). This kind of work will be generative given the global need for environmental and technological sustainability.

Repair is a concept that also links materiality to infrastructure. Infrastructure typically becomes noticeable when needing repair, but is often overlooked before that (Star, 1999). But as Frith (2019) points out, infrastructure is not as hidden as we may think. Recently, we have seen laudable increased attention to mobile infrastructure (e.g., Frith, 2019; Glover-Rijkse, 2019; Wilken, 2019). For example, Campbell et al.'s (2021) analysis of fifth-generation cellular network capabilities and discourses reveals different technological imaginaries of mobile infrastructure in different parts of the world. As technologies and infrastructures evolve, however, what is mobile infrastructure will continue to expand. I think many “Internet researchers” would do well to reflect on how they are really studying mobile communication, given that many in the world are largely accessing the Internet through phones. How and in what ways do mobile materiality and infrastructure matter? On these fronts, we still have so much yet to learn. But MMC is an important place for such inquiry.

Related to materiality and infrastructure, policy is another area which is likely going to become more important to our field. In 2016, the United Nations (UN) added Internet access as a human right (Howell & West, 2016). The UN's policy of Internet access as a human-right pushes back on states who shut down the Internet to inhibit dissenting speech. While this is vitally important for democracy to survive, it does not address Internet access divides. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, broadband connectivity has become a huge area of policy attention and resource allocation. Global, national, and local policy regarding connectivity will be vital for researchers to both measure and help set standards for. As Horst (2013) has argued, mobile media and communication research have much to bring to the conversation regarding how such policies shape people's lives, and how people's mobile media practices should shape such policies.

Some of the policy implications will also involve questions about data. We have already seen this with General Data Protection Regulation in Europe and the Data Security Law in China. But policy questions regarding data generated from mobile social media will continue to need to be addressed. In this vein, mobile media and communication researchers can draw from critical data studies (e.g., D'Ignazio & Klein, 2020) regarding when and how data and their value get produced, distributed, and consumed, and by whom? Who is implicated by these data? Research on the materiality, infrastructure, and policy aspects of mobile media and communication will be fundamental to understanding their processes and impacts. I am confident that MMC in the next 10 years will continue to be a home for interdisciplinary and multi-methodological study of mobile media.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I am deeply heartened by MMC’s role in the examination of mobile media and communication. It not only constitutes cutting-edge, innovative research on the growing impact and role of mobile media and communication in the world today, but also represents an outstanding global community of scholars. Mobile social media such as TikTok, YouTube, Tinder, and Instagram are not going away anytime soon, but we need to think expansively about them as mobile infrastructure in addition to how people incorporate them into their everyday lives. I also look forward to what mobile platform will come next and with it new theoretical and empirical questions to be examined within MMC. As we look forward, however, we should be reminded that sometimes it is helpful to examine the past to understand how we got here, and how we get to a better future.