Field challenges

In this 10th anniversary issue, the editors have challenged the editorial board to reflect on the field of mobile media and communication. In accepting this challenge, I will consider major issues related to my research interests and significant findings that drive changes in perspectives. Such an analysis requires a look not only at the present and the future, but at the past as well.

Conceptualization

In the case of topics close to my research agenda, there has been over the past years a significant shift in the theoretical understanding of the way people use and integrate mobile communication into their daily lives. Compared to a decade ago and earlier, theories of media no longer construe a sharp divide between mobile and other forms of communication, or between online and offcommunication. The distinction between digital/mobile and real life has been largely erased. This is partly due to a change in technologies of digital communication and what might be called the mobile pivot.

An illustration of this conceptual step forward may be seen in the breakdown of formerly rigid boundaries between mobile communication and other forms of communication, especially between the field of computer-mediated communication (CMC) and that of mobile communication. Newer theoretical paradigms, such as that advocated by Scott W. Campbell (2019); Scott Campbell (2020), see the inter-mixing of mobile communication processes increasingly erasing boundaries between the two fields. This erasure has implications for the field of mobile communication both internally and externally. Internally, the scope of what can be legitimately considered as a topic of interest within the ambit of mobile communication has been expanded. Externally, the field boundaries of other disciplines have expanded into the mobile communication domain; this benefits the mobile communication field by having new cadres of researchers engaged with its issues. Fresh ideas and cohorts of new researchers are now contributing to the field. Campbell goes so far as to claim that CMC has now become primarily a mobile phenomenon (p. 101). With good reason he can make this claim, namely that the prior physical setup and demands of the communication technology generally required it to be immobile, with all that that entailed for users and systems. This limitation in turn meant that the CMC perspective typically and justifiably posited that users were physically static. The technologies that produced CMC were themselves bound to desktop computers and physically (via wires) connected systems. Yet with laptops shrinking, tablet and smart phones form factors growing, and network access becoming wireless and pervasive, it soon became difficult to meaningfully distinguish the two physical formats.

Playing out against these field-specific changes has been a larger conceptual shift in how technologies of communication were perceived by both the professional community of researchers and the larger public. Perhaps no other paradigm can capture the prior state of thinking, albeit with exceptions and reservations, is the popular, easy-to-grasp idea of “digital natives versus digital immigrants” (Prensky, 2001). Two decades ago, this concept caught the imagination of mobile communication researchers and pundits alike, and made its way into the argot of popular culture. The terminology became a catch-all to describe the dramatic growth in mobile communication use that was easy to notice. Within the paradigm, much emphasis was placed on young people's use of mobiles as it was easy to contrast their intense embrace of the technology compared to that of older generations. Some even asserted that youngsters had some special insight into the underlying technology of mobile communication. Yet cooler analytical heads prevailed. As the mobile technologies became more powerful and user-friendly, many of the seeming generationally delimiting factors fell away. More serious investigations of potential cognitive differences—for instance, between immigrants and natives—found vanishingly slight to no justification for the thesis (Bennett et al., 2008; Helsper & Eynon, 2009). From a larger perspective, the “digital native versus digital immigrants” debate was a metonymy for the view that there was something inherently different about those who grew up around mobile and digital media. The idea of two worlds was a convenient way to look at the world and also to analyze mobile data. But such an approach obscured more than it revealed. By contrast, new paradigms of understanding have arisen in the communication studies field which hold that mobile communication is governed by the same social forces that affect ordinary behavior with the exception that it can exaggerate and highlight aspects of human behavior that might otherwise escape detection or analysis. One illustration of the more modern approach may be seen in Tomita’s (2021) “second-online” perspective.

Mobile communication studies have become sophisticated theoretically by disambiguating and enriching analyses of the mobile communication ritual. An example of a theoretically innovative frameworks is the Cellphone Relevance Hypothesis proposed by Cummings and Reimer (2020). They conceptualize the degree of disruption (of face-to-face communication by mobile communication) as contextually and relationally moderated rather than a deterministic trade-off between two competing modes of interaction. These theorists assert that mobile technology usages affect conversational satisfaction when in a face-to-face situation, and this satisfaction level hinges on what the participants’ perceptions are of the instrumentality or contextual relevance of their partner's mobile communication activity. As a result, mobile technology may either help support or diminish face-to-face communication quality. In contrast to the concerns that taking a mobile phone call always comes at the social cost to the dyadic partner, Cummings and Reimer hold that such calls actually can be conducive to good results, namely when “participants [can] recognize [that] their partners are able to integrate the phone into the conversation in a way that increases engagement” (p. 288). This line of research systematically expands on and broadens the contingency model I suggested a decade earlier (Katz, 1999). It also links with a valuable theoretical framework proposed by Vanden Abeele (2020) who addresses contingency factors around phubbing.

Where do I expect the field to be in 5 and 10 years?

Where is the field's future research trajectory heading? Here a powerful trend has been, and will certainly continue to be, increasing visual communication via mobiles. As the capability of mobile networks and devices has grown, so too has the emphasis on visual elements. TikTok has demonstrated the powerful grip of short-form video production and has been accompanied by many other modalities such as Instagram and YouTube, the latter especially in terms of its wildly successful “challenges.” Across an entire spectrum of platforms, visual elements are increasingly dominating the way in which mobile communication is being used. This is especially true in terms of using the mobile for production and consumption of video material.

To some this trend was predictable. In fact, I can immodestly submit that I was one such person and made this argument in 1992 based on my research at Bell Communications Research. I concluded that there was a need for tools that people could use to make their own digital productions. In that year, I presented my findings in a talk at the International Communication Association annual meeting (Katz, 1992). On the panel session was George Gerbner, former dean of the Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania. I argued that people would soon be making their own short-form video productions, often in a mobile format, and, knowing what was going on in the laboratories, that there would soon be easy-to-use tools for individuals to edit and share such videos. This, I claimed, would become a popular way of communicating and providing personalized entertainment. Dr Gerbner was having none of it. He insisted that any such material would be too low-quality and amateurish to be of interest. What he foresaw, instead, was that Hollywood would be making ever-more lavish and expensive films. In a word, they would be more spectacular. Both of us fervently argued for our positions. And, in a sense, it turned out we both had some correct predictions.

The reason I mention this event is to assert that the trajectory of mobile visual communication has been growing for a long time, and there is every reason to expect it to grow. People will increasingly be making their own video productions with easy-to-use tools and will find new ways to share their output. The ever-smarter smart phone will continue to make it ever easier to make, distribute, and consume such media even as the common user becomes savvier in clever production techniques. Yet there continues to be potential for all forms of amateur video production on many platforms.

A few simple metrics can indirectly show the success of consumer and mixed professional–consumer (pro-sumer) production. It has been estimated that in 2020 there were roughly 37 million YouTube channels where 22,000 creators had more than a million subscribers and 230,000 creators who had more than 100,000 subscribers (Geyser, 2022). Mobile devices and communication are a big part of this equation. Although I was unable to find the precise data that I wanted to demonstrate how much amateur and pro-sumer video is transmitted over networks across time, I have found data that shows that as of 2021 nearly half of all downstream traffic consisted of video streaming (48.9%) (Wallach, 2021). The video-streaming portion of downstream traffic can be further broken down as follows: YouTube (48%), TikTok (16%), Facebook video (15%), Instagram (12%), and other services (9%). In terms of social networking services, which constitute 19% of downstream traffic, the heavily visual Instagram service made up 42% and Facebook made up 51%. Although it is impossible to tell how much of these torrents of content were of the amateurish or pro-sumer variety, it is highly plausible that a meaningful proportion of this material is of that nature. (It is reasonable to speculate that amateur content is a significantly higher proportion of TikTok compared to YouTube.) Once again, I was unable to find what percentage of these productions drew upon mobile video content or used mobiles in the editing and post-production process, but it is not implausible that a substantial portion used these platforms.

My argument about the importance of visual communication via mobiles as a site of production and consumption has direct implications for the content and themes of mobile communication research in the years ahead. It also links back to the discussion about the breakdown between large-scale stationary means of production and consumption typical of early CMC studies. In this case, though, the implications spill over into the fields of research and commentary on movie production and consumption and film studies in general. Likewise, the conclusions link back to discussions of problematic phone use such as phubbing (Kadylak, 2019). Although text messaging and phone calls were an early concern, the presence of visually rich data is now complementing the many ways mobile devices can be irritants in social relationships. The visual dimension in mobile communication practices as people cooperate and conflict opens up new vistas of inquiry for the research community. One recent example here is Rozgonjuk et al.'s (2020) study which looked at the activities of 305 Instagram users. They found that while Instagram use frequency could be linked to the frequency of problematic smartphone use (PSU) it was not related to individualistic variables such as depression and anxiety.

By way of conclusion, then, important conceptual breakthroughs and theoretical refinements have led to improved and enriched understandings of social forces acting on mobile communication in terms of use and perceptions. The rise of visual uses of mobile communication can lead to a similar improvement. Finally, as the power and productivity of mobile visual communication continues to grow, exciting new research opportunities and theoretical puzzles await the mobile communication studies community.