Futures of Learning

With mobile phone usage now reaching almost fifty per cent of the world’s population, there continues to be an urgent need to understand the impact and influence of mobile communication practices across the globe. Mobile Communication and Society: A Global Perspective examines contemporary mobile communication and the transformations which the incorporation of mobile phones in society. Co-authored by Manuel Castells, Mireira Fernández-Ardèvol, Jack Linchuan Qiu and Araba Sey as a project by the Annenberg School Research Network, the book synthesizes a range of qualitative and quantitative research on mobile phones in an effort to “construct an empirically grounded argument on the social logic embedded in wireless communication, and on the shaping of this logic by users and uses in various cultural and institutional contexts” (4).  Framed within the rubric of Castells now famous notion of the “network society”, the authors divide the book into eight, topically oriented chapters. The book begins with a survey of the global mobile phone infrastructure and differences in the diffusion and adoption of wireless communication in Africa, Asia, Europe, Oceania and the Americas. The authors then turn to the everyday, mundane changes in family and work life, time and new language practices in different national and regional contexts. They conclude by returning to broader questions about societal changes spurred and/or extended by mobile communication, such as the rapid uptake of mobile phones by youth, in the developing world, in social movements and in global development agendas.

While there is much in this collective volume that will be worthy of attention for readers in a range of academic disciplines, telecommunications companies as well as a variety of government and non-governmental organizations, one of the key contributions of Castells, Fernández-Ardèvol, Qiu and Sey’s analysis revolves around their attention to infrastructure and the forces that shape an individual’s ability to participate in what the author’s term the “mobile network society”.  More than a simple matter of access, the co-authors identify and explore factors which they view as critical to understanding patterns of adoption and appropriation. For example, in their introductory chapters they focus upon the role of geography and population density in shaping the rapid uptake of mobile phones across a range of island nations, such as Japan, Korea, the United Kingdom, and even less affluent countries like Jamaica and the Philippines.  They also draw connections between geography and population density and the relative prominence of mobile phones in urban areas. By contrast, larger countries such as the United States, China and South Africa which possess vast expanses of land and relatively disperse rural populations face a range of challenges which impact upon mobile phone penetration rates and, in turn, the ability to integrate the technological infrastructures underpinning basic adoption of mobile phones. This attempt to develop comparable concepts across national and regional boundaries is particularly useful given the scale and ambitions of the book.

Billing and pricing structures, telecommunications standards, competition and regulation also emerge as central to the adoption and appropriation of mobile phones worldwide. From calling cards and pre-paid phones to the sharing of phones, personal SIM cards, use of the more cost-efficient texting, or SMS, as well as systems of credits and remittances, creative micro-economies emerge in response to the cost and economic models of payment. While professionals and businesses continue to be at the forefront of mobile phone adoption, Castells, Fernández-Ardèvol, Qiu and Sey suggest that many innovations in billing and cost emerge from the more marginalized sectors of society, such as migrants, who navigate considerable economic constraints and social challenges while working away from their homes and families. Drawing upon recent research by co-author Jack Qiu, the authors discuss the importance of mobile phones for rural-urban Chinese migrants. Although there remains a wide variation in the models and payment plans, they argue that migrants spend a large percentage of their budget on mobile phones and air time, which they attribute to the desire to maintain contact with family and others in their home towns as well as an emblem of status. In these instances, migrants often become one of the main drivers for cheap and flexible service innovations in the mobile telecommunications industry at the “bottom” of the market. Similarly, and perhaps more coherently than any other study with which I am familiar, Castells, Fernández-Ardèvol, Qiu and Sey also provide compelling evidence that youth have become important drivers of the mobile phone industry.  Through an analysis of the development of the telecommunications industry and diffusion in different countries, they reveal how the industry began by marketing mobile phones to businesses but later discovered that youth (especially in Europe and Asia) rapidly appropriated the mobile phone. In response, the industry altered their established marketing strategies and began to cater to the demand of the global youth market. As they argue, this represents a significant shift away from previous models of technology adoption and innovation.

Like Castells’ network society thesis, Castells, Fernández-Ardèvol, Qiu and Sey believe that “wireless communication technology does have powerful social effects” which reflects “the networking logic that defines the human experience of our time” (258). Yet, they also acknowledge that social practices and institutions play an important role in defining the textures and possibilities of mobile communication in society. For example, whereas many accounts attribute the widespread use of texting in the Philippines to frugality, research reveals that many of the most prolific users of SMS are in fact professionals in the their 30s for whom cost of a message does not represent their primary concern (140). Similarly, work among low-income households in Chile completed by Ureta suggests that mobility and economic necessity may not fully account for the fact that low-income families tend to treat their mobile phone like a shared, family land line rather than a device which may help each individual in the family maximize their earning potential. Such beliefs also influence the imaginative potential of the mobile phone in everyday life. In contrast to recent work in the United States where young people assert the importance of the mobile phone in terms of its salience as a symbol of independence, mobility and autonomy from the strictures of parents and the family., Yoon’s study of teens and family in Korea reveals that “the adoption of the mobile phone plays a major role in reinforcing traditional structures of family, school, and youth peer group under the cheong networks” (148). Similarly, and with respect to gender, the authors note that, “relative to Europe and America, the Asian Pacific exhibits a traditional patriarchal gendered pattern of diffusion…even in Japan and South Korea” (44) as well as in African countries such as Ethiopia, Uganda, South Africa, Rwanda and Cameroon. Such factors, what the authors refer to as the sociotechnical context, possess clear implications for participation and engagement. It also reveals a diversity of practices which possess the potential to challenge our assumptions about the totalizing influence of technology, as well as provide insights into creative innovations not often considered in the more comfortable living spaces of industry and academic life.

Together, the authors’ efforts to synthesize, consolidate and recognize patterns in a range of practices is ambitious in scope and brings to the fore the importance of a broad notion of infrastructure that takes into account different local, regional and national contexts alongside meaningful variations in different sociotechnical contexts. Mobile Communication and Society: A Global Perspective is also a testament to collaborative work in that the author(s) various sets of regional and disciplinary expertise—Fernández-Ardèvol’s knowledge of Catalonia and the European literature, Qiu’s extensive work in China and Sey’s expertise in the African context and, of course, Castells’ ongoing contributions to conceptualizing broader changes in society – emerge as considerable assets to the book’s ability to analyze the mobile communication in a vast number of societies. Indeed, most books analyzing mobile phones and communication cross-nationally tend to compile chapters on different national contexts, which are tied together through introductory chapters. In its efforts to introduce and analyze material from Latin America, Africa, South and Southeast Asia and Africa alongside the more established literature on mobile communication practices in Northern Europe, East Asia (e.g. Japan and Korea) as well as North America, this book’s integrated analysis is distinctive. These cross-cultural (or perhaps more precisely, cross-national) differences underpin the need to think critically about our organizing categories when analyzing the adoption and appropriation on a global scale and illustrates the need for more empirical research during a period of rapid growth and change in the telecommunications arena, particularly in the space around new media and learning.  And while I am skeptical that the notion of the “mobile network society” is a particularly useful term for conceptualizing mobile phone practices in the “network society” (the “network society” also being a contested concept--see, for example, John Postill’s recent article in New Media and Society, 2008), as research on the global dimensions of global communication continues, Mobile Communication and Society will clearly hold an important place as a work that theorizes, compares and captures the contemporary mobile telecommunications landscape. 

Note: Please get in touch if you are carrying out research on mobile phones and mobile communication.

--Heather A. Horst

Today, the Pew Internet and American Life Project, in collaboration with the Mills College Civic Engagement Research Group, released a report of findings of the first nationally representative survey of how teen video gaming relates to civic engagement. The study was an effort to survey the distribution of certain forms of video game practice in teen culture, as well as to investigate specific questions about what forms of gaming contribute to prosocial and civic forms of engagement. The project has released a report that documents the overall findings of the survey (authored by Amanda Lenhart, Joseph Kahne, Ellen Middaugh, Alexandra Rankin Macgill, Chris Evans, and Jessica Vitak), as well as a research paper analyzing the civic potential of video games (authored by Joseph Kahne, Ellen Middaugh, and Chris Evans). 

A note of disclaimer – I participated as an advisor on this project, so I did have a small role in it, and it is funded by the MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Initiative that I also am part of.

This work has a number of interesting findings that are worth highlighting. First, the survey confirms that fact that video games have become a pervasive fact of life for US teens, with 97% reporting that they play some form of video game with boys having only slightly higher rates (99%) than girls (94%). The survey does more than give us these blanket numbers for overall video game engagement, but also asks questions about teens’ favorite games, game genres, and frequency of game play. Here we see a diversity in different forms of game play, with boys more likely to be frequent players, and preferring M rated games more than girls.

Interestingly, the four top games in terms of popularity were Guitar Hero, Halo, Madden NFL, and Solitaire. These four titles span an immense range in terms of genre, giving good evidence that the forms of game play are diversifying and that we should not approach teen game play assuming that there is a single “typical” form of game player or a single game or game genre that is overwhelmingly popular. This may seem to be a commonsensical point, but so often public debates over game play proceed as if there are particular kinds of behavioral effects of game play that apply regardless of the form of game play involved. A teen who lists Solitaire as a favorite game is likely to be a very different kind of gamer than one who lists Madden NFL or Halo.

The survey also confirms that gaming is a social activity for most teens, with only 24% saying that they only play alone. These findings are in line with the work reported on in Grand Theft Childhood, that gaming has become a baseline for social participation, and that teens who don’t game are more likely to be socially troubled than kids who do. I would have liked to know the relationship between game genres and the level of social game play. For example, of the 24% who play alone, are they more likely to play so-called casual genres such as Solitaire? Or are those kids fairly distributed among different game genres? Based on our ethnographic work, I would expect the former, but the report does not break down the results in this way.

After setting out these findings about the overall distribution of game practices, the report focuses on civic engagement measures more specifically. The research paper explains how the authors identified certain features of gaming which they call “civic gaming experiences” that they see as exhibiting features of civic engagement.

The civic characteristics of game play:  Do teens who have civic experiences while gaming—such as playing games that simulate civic activities, helping or guiding other players, organizing or managing guilds (an opportunity to develop social networks), learning about social issues, grappling with ethical issues—demonstrate greater commitment to and engagement in civic and political activity than those with limited exposure to civic gaming experiences?

Overall, the study found that teens who have high levels of civic gaming experiences also tend to have high levels of civic and political engagement. They also found that teens who tend to play with others in real life also have higher rates of civic and political engagement than teens who primarily play alone, and that the same was true for teens who have social interaction around the game, such as commenting on web sites or contributing to online discussion groups. One of the more surprising findings was that the link to civic and political engagement did not hold for teens who played with others online. Included in this category are both more casual “pick-up” forms of online play as well as more intensive forms, such as in MMO guilds. This deserves further investigation; my guess is that the different forms of online play would have different relationships to civic engagement measures. In our observations of youth gaming practice, we’ve found certain forms of engagement that are highly social, but much more focused on competition and performance than what you would think of as a more expansive civic orientation, while other forms of gaming have more explicitly civic and political agendas. The more we can get specific about these different dimensions of practice, the more we can begin to untangle the threads that tie together gaming activity with different dimensions of kids’ lives.

One of the significant findings for educational practice is that civic engagement activities are relatively equitably distributed, where income level, race, and age do not determine levels of engagement. The only major demographic category that did make a difference, not surprisingly, was gender, with girls having lower rates of civic gaming experiences. In our ethnographic work, we also found that girls had lower rates of participation in the more social and “geeked out” forms of gaming. The finding that civic gaming is accessible regardless of socioeconomic status is a significant one. The report authors point out that traditional measures of civic engagement indicate that elite youth are much more likely to have access to these experiences. In other words, if gaming is indeed an avenue into civic engagement, it could become one that provides broader avenues for access for diverse teens.

The survey is an effort to get more precise about the specific forms of games and game practices that might be related to specific forms of public participation. In other words, this report is doing work to move the discussion of the learning outcomes of gaming away from simply positing relationships between media content and behavior. Instead, the report suggests looking at the social and cultural contexts of gaming in practice. In doing this, the report does not assume that participatory forms of gaming automatically result in civic participation.

This work is a promising step in building an empirical base for mapping relationships between recreational and social new media practice and ones that have a closer relationship to formal education and civic engagement. The findings confirm many of the intuitions and initial findings of those of us engaged in qualitative research in this area – that youth engagement in sociable forms of play relate to comparable forms of sociability in other realms of life. At the same time, the report challenges us to be much more precise about positing the nature of these linkages, and to proceed with cautious optimism in interventions that target the space between game play and civic engagement.

I’m happy to be launching a new blog that documents a new research effort just getting under way, a follow on to some of the work that I have been doing with the MacArthur Foundation Digltal Media and Learning initiative. After completing three years of ethnographic research on youth new media practice with an extended research team, I am taking a step back and trying to get a better sense of what has been happening in the field while I’ve been deeply immersed in the empirical work. I’ll be among a really great international group of researchers, who will be taking a few months to do reading on research and practice in the area of new media and learning, and also to visit different institutions and projects in the US and elsewhere that are innovating in this space. Along the way, we will be using this blog as a way to share some of what we are learning, and to solicit feedback on our work in progress. We will be posting book and article reviews and reports from our visits to various sites and conferences.

This work is one small piece of the broader effort of the MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning initiative and its many partners to support the growth of a field of new media and learning. Our ambition its to help grow a field of research and practice that is grounded in deep knowledge of the changing landscape of new media, as well as in an understanding of innovation in educational and design practice. Just as we hope our earlier research on youth new media practice can inform the research community as well as practitioners in education and technology development, so we hope this review of work in the field can help inform a wide range of stakeholders in this field.