Mobile Media & Communication

Drawing on the Ask Viamo Anything (AVA) Pilot in Zambia, a voice-first generative AI integrated into mobile phones, this article examines how mobile AI platforms reassemble the gendered digital divide. Through a feminist technology studies and feminist data justice lens, it argues that systems like AVA embody both empowerment and constraint: they enable women and youth to engage in private, trusted, voice-based communication while simultaneously reproducing structural exclusions through language, moderation, and infrastructural dependency. This commentary situates mobile AI within mobile communication scholarship, extending its concern with everyday mediation, intimacy, and mobility into the algorithmic age. In doing so, the article illustrates mobile AI as a new communicative form that redistributes agency, visibility, and voice along gendered lines.

This qualitative study explores the initial integration of smartphones and social media within Iranian families during a period of rapid adoption (2015–2016). Using a grounded theory approach, in-depth interviews were conducted with 30 parents and children aged 15–20 years in Isfahan, Iran. The analysis revealed that the mobile phone functions as a central site for the negotiation of freedom and constraint, giving rise to four core themes. Findings showed a clash between parental views of the phone as a utilitarian “Tool in Hand” and children's use of it as a “Mirror in Front” for identity expression. The study also details the tension between parental “Eyes That Watch” and youths’ desire for “Wings That Fly,” as well as the conflict between traditional family values of “Home” and personal aspirations for a wider “Horizon.” Finally, the theme of “Veil and Voice” illustrates how deeply rooted gendered expectations reinforce patriarchal norms, even as girls find strategic avenues for self-expression. This research offers crucial baseline insights into the domestication of mobile technology in a traditional non-Western context, illuminating how families were compelled to renegotiate established moral and cultural frameworks in response to the disruptive arrival of smartphones.

This study investigated the dual roles of mothers as models and regulators in influencing adolescents’ short video use (A-SVU). Using survey data from 7,509 Chinese mother−adolescent dyads, the study confirmed a positive modeling effect, demonstrating that maternal short video use significantly increased adolescent usage. Restrictive mediation, however, presented a more complex picture: general restrictive mediation showed an inverted U-shape relationship with A-SVU, while more specific restrictions were associated with reduced A-SVU. The style of restriction also mattered; applying restriction in an autonomy-supportive style decreased A-SVU, whereas controlling and inconsistent styles led to a counterproductive effect. Subsequent moderation analysis suggested that this boomerang effect was most pronounced when mothers used short videos infrequently but applied restrictions in a controlling manner. These findings were cross-validated by both adolescent-reported and mother-reported restrictive mediation, with adolescent-reported restrictive mediation serving as stronger predictors of A-SVU than mothers’ reports.

This study discusses the ways in which power is negotiated, and dynamics are shaped through mobile media in Chinese families living in trans-local contexts. While traditional Chinese family values emphasize parental responsibility and moral guidance, the heavy reliance on connections made through digital media because of trans-locality introduces new tensions between involvement and the pursuit of independence by children. Drawing on panopticism and the typology of power, including power over, power with, and power to, this analysis establishes a relational framework for unpacking the processes of how authority, autonomy, and care are negotiated in digitally mediated parent–child interactions. Findings from digital diaries and interviews with 20 Chinese trans-local families suggest that the affordances provided by mobile media act as an infrastructure of power, enabling differentiated power schemes that restructure family dynamics. These schemes vary in intensity and consequence, from coercive compliance to negotiated cooperation and trust-based autonomy. Based on these schemes, the study further proposes a mobile media panoptic model to illustrate the dynamic processes of power negotiation in these mobile family interactions. Moving beyond behavioral accounts, this study provides a process-based analysis of how power is enacted and contested in mediated family life. It contributes to understandings of how digital technologies transform family dynamics in the context of mobility and cultural expectations.

Mobile media decision-making is a mid-range, integrative theory that addresses the transformative role of mobile media in contemporary decision-making processes. Accordingly, mobile media augment human cognitive processes by being accessible to users as they move through and act in the world. Moreover, this theory accounts for the emergence of mobile autonomous systems that can move through and act in the world, in the absence of human cognition. As an analytical tool, this theory can be applied to understand specificities of how humans and nonhumans act, move, know, and produce agential change in the world. It can inform scholarship that explores social and material impacts, moral–ethical dimensions, and the design of mobile systems that augment and supplant human decision-making processes.

This article explores the integration of AI-surveillance functionality into urban infrastructures to question how the monitoring of mobilities could engender vulnerabilities, particularly for minoritized or stigmatized groups in society. Focusing on the automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) system deployed in the United States by the company Flock Safety, I show how this system acts as a communicative network that exposes people to discriminatory police surveillance. I argue that the network properties of Flock's system facilitate the application of far-right policing cultures across jurisdictions, allowing for unlawful targeting of women seeking reproductive care, immigrants, and vulnerable others irrespective of state or city prohibitions against such profiling. The article concludes by reflecting on countersurveillance efforts to expose Flock's surveillance network and challenge its discriminatory policing logics.

Since its release in 2016, Pokémon Go has enjoyed widespread popularity and attracted research interest across various disciplines. With the recent transition of ownership to Scopely, this bibliometric review offers a timely examination of the knowledge structure within Pokémon Go research. A total of 393 publications related to Pokémon Go were retrieved from the Scopus database. Performance analysis was conducted to identify key contributors, institutions, and publication trends. Cocitation analysis revealed four foundational domains shaping the scholarly landscape of Pokémon Go research. Thematic mapping further identified nine prominent research themes, ranging from physical activity and immersive experience to educational applications and safety concerns. As Pokémon Go moves into a new phase under different ownership, this review not only acknowledges its academic impact but also highlights how the game has evolved beyond entertainment to serve as a scientific tool that advances research across multiple domains.

In this paper, we examine the developments at the crossroads of mobile phones and AI––mobile AI––by highlighting and considering their implications for the significant, cross-cutting, and highly intersectional area of disability. As we shall discuss, disability is remarkably prominent in how mobile AI is imagined and deployed. Several kinds of mobile AI explicitly claim to provide innovations that will improve the lives of disabled people. Such claims regarding disability have been associated with the arc of mobile media and communication since the first-generation cellular mobile phones (and telecommunications before that), as well as with the most recent phase of AI fervor fueled by generative AI. While there is some emerging work in relation to disability and AI, as yet, there is little critical discussion of disability in relation to mobile AI. Against this backdrop, we are keen to spotlight disability on the mobile AI research agenda. To do so, we discuss the implementation of an AI voice assistant by Grab. Grab is a superapp operating across Southeast Asian nation-states that has already made its mark on mobile communication and everyday life through a range of offerings. Targeted at disabled people, we analyze how Grab’s AI Voice Assistant functions and discuss its implications for inclusion and the future of mobile media and communications.

Older adults – meaning people over the age of 65 – are the first generation to grow old in a digital data-saturated world and represent a diverse range of digital literacies. Some have a long history of mobile media adoption, interest, and play, while others are less digitally familiar or literate. When it comes to older adults and artificial intelligence (AI), research has explored how the health and wellbeing of older adults can be optimized and improved through mobile AI. At the same time, the World Health Organization has warned of the risks of ageism in developing AI-based technologies that rely on ageist assumptions about the role of technology in the lives of older adults. Researchers, policymakers, and technology developers must work collaboratively and ethically with older people to build or adapt AI technologies that meet their needs while being cognizant of concerns and risks. To that end, there is little empirical evidence of older adults’ quotidian practices with mobile AI, their attitudes toward it, and what they think the future of mobile AI might hold. In this commentary paper, which draws on ethnographic and creative methods data from a larger study, we argue that the heterogeneous perspectives, perceptions, and practices of older adults must be included in the design, policy, and regulation of mobile AI.

This article examines the merging of mobile media and gaming cultures through mobile esports (electronic sports). Exploring the accessibility and challenges associated with mobile esports labor practices offers a critical look at Indonesia's informal economy today. This economy operates at the intersection of mobile networked creativity and “playbour"—the blend of play and work—in a fragile employment environment. The article introduces the concept of mobile playbour to analyze specific practices in Indonesia, emphasizing the creative, social, and emotional labor of players that drives the monetization of esports. It ultimately highlights digital and community-building opportunities, the structural instability of mobile game labor, and its broader implications for creativity and monetization in mobile media and game studies.

In contrast to states and industries promoting continuous innovation, discourse around digital disconnection suggests that individuals increasingly seek a reduced presence of technology. Recognizing that ordinary people have limited opportunities to create and articulate their own visions of life with digital media, this study employs a creative inquiry with 20 women in emerging adulthood (ages 18 to 29) from Germany (n = 10) and Norway (n = 10). Specifically, participants reflected on the role a smartphone would play in an ideal world, expressing themselves through drawings, text, and bullet points. Employing utopian thought as the guiding framework, the data reveal both formative desires and perceptions of responsibility across three themes: (1) ideal self, reflecting a wish for greater self-discipline in personal use; (2) ideal technology, involving critiques of technological design and industry interests; and (3) ideal society, envisioning collective change toward reduced device use.

As a field, mobile media and communication (MMC) has centrally been concerned with how people use mobile communication technology and the implications for human sociality, psychology, and culture. This article encourages us to think more deeply, and differently, about concepts and practices of mobile media and mobile communication by examining the uses and consequences of MMC among whales. By looking at MMC in the animal world, we gain a new vantage point for thinking about the core elements of mobility, media, and communication, and how they can come together to shape everyday life and survival. By looking beyond the Anthropocene, this more-than-human perspective offers conceptual enrichment for scholarship in the field, while using MMC as a lens for considering how humans (“culture”) and animals (“nature”) are entangled in meaningful ways (natureculture).

This study investigates how students perceive mobile, generative AI tools such as ChatGPT as regulating cognitive load and emotional demands during learning. The research examines how AI-mediated mobile communication affects intrinsic, extraneous, and germane cognitive load, and how these perceptions influence mental effort, cognitive engagement, learning anxiety, and perceived academic performance. The study is situated in Nepal, where mobile learning and smartphone-based educational practices often substitute for limited institutional support. Guided by Cognitive Load Theory, a structural equation model was developed to examine relationships between perceived AI-mediated load types and student outcomes. The model was tested using survey data from 314 higher education students who had experience using ChatGPT through mobile devices. Results show that students who perceived ChatGPT as reducing extraneous load and enhancing germane load reported lower anxiety and higher cognitive engagement. These perceptions were also associated with higher perceived academic performance and more efficient mental effort. Intrinsic load remained a significant constraint but was mitigated when ChatGPT was used as a mobile scaffold in complex learning tasks. This is one of the first theory-driven studies to empirically test how students perceive generative AI's influence on multiple dimensions of cognitive load in mobile learning environments. The research contributes theoretical and empirical insights to information systems and educational technology by reframing mobile AI not merely as a usability tool but as a mechanism for cognitive load management and emotional regulation in under-resourced educational systems. The findings offer practical guidance for educators and instructional designers seeking to integrate generative AI into mobile learning strategies. ChatGPT can serve as a portable cognitive and emotional support system that clarifies complex concepts, reduces learning anxiety, and enhances engagement. Incorporating guided mobile AI use into coursework can improve learning efficiency and emotional well-being without increasing instructional workload, particularly in resource-constrained higher education settings.

Contemporary maps are creatures of “mobile AI,” the linkage of machine learning with communication and mobility, which we now think of as a significant “next phase” of digital communication. In this article, we address this AI-driven “next phase” by examining the current AI-facilitated developments that are reshaping mobile maps and navigational apps. We consider how AI tools are changing the maps that we have (how maps are made), how we interact with mobile maps and navigation services (how maps are used), and their purposes (what maps are doing). By analyzing mobile maps at the intersection of geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI), platformization, and mobile AI, this article shows how the automation of navigation reorganizes everyday mobility, redistributes decision-making, and generates new political, economic, and social questions. Mobile maps offer a particularly revealing case for understanding how AI is being embedded into mobile media, how value is extracted from movement, and how infrastructural decisions are increasingly delegated to platform systems.

Mobile phones and associated services possess substantial potential to improve household livelihoods. However, there is inadequate access to and use of mobile-based technologies, despite their potential to improve livelihoods in the Hadiya zone, Ethiopia. This study aims to analyse the main factors influencing the adoption of mobile-based technology. The analysis employed an ordered logit model on cross-sectional data collected from 278 respondents. The findings indicate that factors such as gender, education, affordability, access to remittances, social networks, awareness, geographical location, trade access, and type of mobile phone have positively and significantly influenced the likelihood of adopting mobile-based digital technology, except age. The implications suggest that mobile-based technology adoption remains under-utilised for essential activities, with adoption particularly lower among women and rural populations. Targeted interventions, including infrastructure improvements, digital connectivity enhancement, awareness campaigns, skill training, income-raising initiatives, and gender-sensitive digital policies, are essential to promote adoption.

A growing body of research has attempted to understand the impact of social media platforms and digital technologies on younger generations’ daily lives and everyday experiences. Within this broader research context, previous research has shown that the various uses of the internet have become integrated into everyday life experiences, making digital technologies increasingly embedded in young people's daily routines and affecting domains such as time management, subjective experiences of time, and time perception. Using a comprehensive quantitative design, the current study explored how the continuous use of hyperconnected technologies (especially smartphones) shapes students’ subjective perception of online time and behaviors related to mobile phone use (perceived and excessive use) in students’ daily lives. Extensive questionnaires were completed by 732 undergraduate and postgraduate students. The results show that different patterns of internet use are associated with distinct ways of experiencing and managing everyday time, which in turn relate to variations in perceived and excessive mobile phone use. The findings also show how subjective online time perception contributes to differentiated experiential outcomes, highlighting the role of usage purpose in shaping digital practices. Overall, the findings shed light on experiential mechanisms linking internet use, subjective time perception, and mobile technology practices, contributing to a more nuanced understanding of hyperconnected technologies in students’ daily lives.

Mobile online platform data are inherently dynamic and often ephemeral: content can be deleted, added, or edited over time. Because mobile communication research relies heavily on such platform-derived data, systematic (non-random) changes can create serious data-quality and reproducibility problems. To address this, we developed Datcha, an application that quantifies dataset consistency using standardized indicators. Datcha additionally supports comparative analyses—word frequency comparisons, keyness, topic modeling, and sentiment analysis—between modified and remaining content, enabling researchers to detect whether content deletion, addition, or editing follows systematic patterns.

The increasing presence of artificial intelligence (AI) in the personal domains of human existence has redrawn the lines between technology and emotion, commodity and companionship. As AI grows increasingly adept at communing with us, speaking to us, and, at times, thinking for us, it begins to enter the personal space once designated for human-to-human interaction. However, the concept of AI mobility is not new. Much before it became a personal assistant or a conversational partner, films imagined sentient systems that could walk, learn, and feel. The article examines After Yang, a film that depicts a near future in which androids, or “technosapiens” live alongside humans, often as family members, sharing their emotional and social lives. We investigate the mobility of AI, the aesthetics of emotion, and the development of AI companionship, as it relates to the present time. After Yang urges us to consider how technology, when it becomes social and intimate, affects us, and is affected by us; learns from us, as we learn from it, and altogether reshapes the idea of being human, and how technobias, at its foundation, may be a sort of anthropobias.