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Mobile media have become a central part of everyday life for many teens today. In this study, we examine how teens use the media to access diverse information to maintain and reconnect with different personal relationships. Based on semi-structured interviews with 81 teens from ethnically and economically diverse backgrounds, we find that teens generally have broad networks of ties with whom they communicate through both face-to-face interactions and mobile media. To maintain these networks, the teens in our study use information that they either unexpectedly encounter or purposely seek out on various platforms available on their mobile devices to "reach out" to dormant ties and "catch up" with active ties.

Questions

1. How do teens use mobile media to interact with their personal networks?

2. What information practices do teens have on their mobile media to connect with their active social ties?

3. What information practices do teens have on their mobile media to connect with their dormant social ties?

Method

Explorative semi-structured interviews (40 to 60 minutes) were conducted in 2016 with an ethnically and economically diverse sample of 81 high school students living in the Greater Toronto Area. We interviewed this number of participants as in order to cover many other issues which were part of a larger project.

The semi-structured interviews first started with a series of general questions focused on the various types of daily communication, including face-to-face, SNS and email. Drawing on name generator technique (Fischer, 1982), we asked participants to provide the first names of six specific types of individuals representing their personal networks. Participants were then asked a set of questions regarding how they communicate with them and other aspects of their relationship. At all points during these interviews, interviewers actively tried to listen to the participants and sought to understand the purposes, consequences, and stories behind their mobile media practices.

52:48

Male-female ratio

51%

Lower-income household

81

Age 15-19 teens

The teens in our study use mobile media to catch up and maintain their networks of active ties. With active ties, teens often send short burst signals rather than long formal communication to catch up. Licoppe (2004) refers to this type of activity as “connected presence.” Catching up practices include leveraging the information they either encounter or seek, to start a conversation, or share their daily events with the activated ties. These practices promote social cohesions and intimacy. Similar to the telecocooning hypothesis, Ling’s (2008) notion of bounded solidarity is that mobile interaction fosters intimacy, cohesion, and shared rituals within a particular social realm that insulates one’s social network.

Teens reach out to ties as they identify information gaps, information needs, and information resources. When teens reach out to dormant ties, they often start by liking a person’s post, poking them, or sharing culturally embedded images such as digital memes or interesting articles. These specific practices vary between the participants and they often evolve, reinvent, and recreate these practices over time. This finding does not support concerns that mobile media are manipulating teens and their use of this media is passive (e.g. Turkle, 2015; Twenge, 2017). We find that teens are using social media on their own terms, and that they are often changing these practices as needed. Teens use “tactics to negotiate” (de Certeau, 1984) the material properties of mobile media to fit in their everyday practices.

Publication

Kimm, J. and Boase, J. (2020), Role of Mobile Media in the Lives of Teen: Information, Networks, and Access. In Eszter Hargittai (Eds.), The Handbook on Digital Inequality. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing.

Kimm, J. and Boase, J. (2019), Teens' everyday information practices on mobile media: “catching up” and “reaching out”. The Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 56: 137-146. doi:10.1002/pra2.12