Mobile Media Use as Governed Routine: A Qualitative Study of Adolescents’ Everyday Decision Environments

Abstract

Mobile media are embedded in adolescents’ everyday lives in ways that extend beyond platform features or usage volume, reshaping how time, emotion, and legitimacy are negotiated in routine contexts. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews with adolescents and contextual adult participants in Bangladesh, this study develops a mechanism-centered explanation of mobile media use that foregrounds everyday sociomaterial decision environments rather than outcomes or effects. The analysis identifies six interacting mechanisms that organize adolescents’ mobile media practices: session expansion through temporal drift, affect regulation via intra-session content switching, household legitimacy governance distinguishing study-sanctioned from leisure-contested use, divergence in content filtering outcomes, access ecology shaped by shared devices and time windows, and sleep displacement as a downstream outcome.

Rather than treating mobile media use as uniformly immersive or harmful, the findings show how similar platforms generate divergent trajectories depending on how mobility, availability, household governance, and access conditions structure everyday routines. Session expansion and late-night use emerge not as inherent properties of mobile apps, but as conditional outcomes activated during unregulated temporal windows and constrained by legitimacy and supervision. By situating adolescents’ experiences within Bangladesh as a Global South context, the study offers an explanatory account of how mobile communication reorganizes everyday decision-making and temporal awareness.

Keywords

Mobile communication adolescents decision environments legitimacy governance temporal drift access ecology qualitative research

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