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Our Mobile World Consumption

Christian Casillas

Our Mobile World Consumption


A look at how we consume media across different platforms and its effects on us.
Christian Casillas
SUNY Buffalo State College
COM 450W

Our Mobile World Consumption


Christian Casillas

Abstract:
At the start of 2015, 39 of the top 50 digital news websites had more traffic to

their sites and associated applications coming from mobile devices than from
desktop computers, according to Pew Research Centers analysis of comScore data.
At the same time, though, desktop visitors to these sites tend to spend more time
per visit than do mobile visitors. For half of these top 50 news sites; which include
legacy print, cable, network, international and public broadcasting outlets as well as
digital-only entities, visitors from desktops stay longer than those coming through
mobile. The reverse is true for only 10 of the sites, while for 15 sites the time spent
is roughly equal. Americans changing news habits have a tremendous impact on
how and to what extent our country functions within an informed society (Mitchell).
So too does the state of the organizations producing the news and making it
available to citizens day in and day out. In this paper we will be discussing just that,
and how effective mobile news and entertainment is to the original forms prior.
















Our Mobile World Consumption


Christian Casillas

Introduction:

If you take a glance at any coffee shop, train station, or airport boarding gate,
its easy to see that mobile access to the Internet is taking root in our society. Open
laptops or furrowed brows staring at our mobile phones are evidence of how
routinely information is exchanged on wireless devices. But not everyone has the
wherewithal to engage with always present connectivity and, while some may love
it, others may only dip their toes in the wireless water and not go deeper (Horrigan).
So, does it draw some of us users further into digital lifestyles and false information
or is it truly beneficial?
In 2015, 39 of the top 50 digital news websites had more traffic to their sites
and associated applications coming from mobile devices than from desktop
computers, according to Pew Research Centers analysis of comScore data. At the
same time, though, desktop visitors to these sites tend to spend more time per visit
than do mobile visitors. For half of these top 50 news sites; which include legacy
print, cable, network, international and public broadcasting outlets as well as
digital-only entities, visitors from desktops stay longer than those coming through
mobile (Mitchell).
Body:


With the rapid increase of mobile devices and applications it has become
easier for more and more people to transition from print media and newspapers, or
television and film to online forums, blogs and streaming services to get there
information and entertainment. For example, in March 2011, Time Warner Cable
(TWC) launched an iPad application that would allow its subscribers to stream some

Our Mobile World Consumption


Christian Casillas

of its television content to their iPad, a total of approximately thirty cable channels
(Tryon). Like other digital delivery platforms, the app was announced as a
transformative way of watching television and films. In the advertisement for the
application you see the perspective that platform mobility encourages personalized
viewing, and all of the subjects appear to be alone; it suggests that the individualized
viewer is in control, able to choose when, where and what he or she watches
(Tryon). This I believe to be something powerful. To be able to view things we want
to watch wherever we may be and how ever we want to watch it is a great
advantage. But lets break it down. To make sense of it all we need to know the
media mobility platforms.
First, the media mobility platform, as I defined by Chuck Tryon, refers to the
idea that for example, films and television shows can move seamlessly from one
device to another with minimal interruption. A viewer might start to watch a movie
on her living-room television set and then continue it later on her iPad or mobile
phone. In turn, many of these devices themselves offer varying degrees of mobility
(Tryon). An iPad or laptop might theoretically be used anywhere there is an Internet
connection and a power source, allowing audiences to carry their film collections
with them. This in addition to content moving seamlessly between platforms, the
platforms themselves are mobile, allowing people to use them wherever they wish
from the comfort of their home to the mood of a local coffee shop. Of course,
effective connectivity is far from guaranteed, and although such services as Netflix
and Love Film may promise unlimited access, viewers are often constrained by the

Our Mobile World Consumption


Christian Casillas

max data caps on their phone service, or streaming rights, and other institutional
and economic factors. But digital delivery not only opens up forms of spatial
mobility, it allows us to watch films wherever we happen to be, expanding the time
shifting potential of older television technologies such as using a VCR or a DVR
(Tryon). In the same way you can start reading an article online on your desktop
computer then continue to read it right where you left off on your iPhone.
Now with this mobility timeless media has contributed to us being able to be
more casual about our film and television watching, or newspaper reading and
newsgathering. Its making it possible for viewers to consume according to their
own schedule. Charles Acland refers to this as a rising informality. His claim
echoed by Francesco Cassetti, writes that multitasking spectators treat films as
something to pick up now and put down later. At the same time, platform mobility
also increases the opportunity for repeat viewings, given that users access to
collections. This can be through network websites, Netflix catalogues, or their own
personal collections on a hard drive or in the cloud (Tryon).
This to me brought up some concern. After conducting some personal
research 6 out of 10 people I interviewed from the age range of 18-25 said that they
only finish about half of the movies they start to watch on Netflix. What does this
mean? The way we consume media is now more based on our desires then what is
being put out there. News and entertainment have now become a choice for us to pic
instead of the media choosing what to feed us. We now also limit the media

Our Mobile World Consumption


Christian Casillas

producers by having the ability to use free online and mobile news instead of having
to buy newspapers or magazines.
Discourses of platform mobility taps into larger desires for community, in
part through the depictions of how these new technologies can be incorporated
seamlessly into the suburban, middle-class home, especially in the USA. Much like
the popular discourses surrounding television in the 1950s, advertising for mobile
phones, portable media players and other forms of platform mobility all help to
define the ways in which these media technologies are understood.
How then do we determine our communication platform choice in news
consumption? According to Samson Struckmann, we do this by the interplay of three
key elements potentially influencing device choice:
(1) The communication device per say,
(2) The user, and
(3) The situational context.
Firstly, the different communication devices are different types of technologies.
Based on previous research we do know that users long-termed attitudes towards
new technologies and/or devices influence their decisions to actually use them.
With that you can hypothesize those characteristics of the communication device,
the perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use will influence communication
device choice for consuming news (Struckmann). Secondly, users perceived uses
and gratifications of certain behaviors are known to have a strong impact on the
users behaviors, a fact well researched for a multitude of online media behavior

Our Mobile World Consumption


Christian Casillas

(Struckmann). And thirdly, in addition to these two factors, early studies on news
diffusion had shown that the locational and social context of usage is heavily
influencing communication device choice. Usually we do know that social
surroundings do have an impact on media use in so far as individuals can exploit
this highly observable media use to enhance their social status (Struckmann). It is
also thought that the personal technologies can help to reduce family conflict over
entertainment, in most cases by offering individualized viewing experiences
creating a better personal social status among families.

Now, how does this affect the media itself? For example, while publishers of

newspapers are aiming to provide users with complementary ways of accessing the
news, there are risks that their new mobile services displace those they offer in
print and on the Web, while earning even less revenue (Nel). Newspapers are now
in flux. Having seen their traditional businesses battered by forces that include
structural changes fuelled by the rapid growth of mobile platforms and cyclical
shifts in the economy, mainstream news publishers have intensified efforts to adapt
their journalism processes and products. The content available through most of the
mobile services is comparatively light. With this they can almost force the heaviest
users to be inclined to also seek out more extensive content available in the
companion print and online products into which the richest income streams still
flow. Unless newspapers rethink their current approaches, they risk not having any
more economic success with mobile than they have had thus far online. However,
while some news publishers have held back from publishing their general content

Our Mobile World Consumption


Christian Casillas

on smartphones or tablets, their inaction has risks, too: independent developers are
leaping at the opportunity to create apps that harvest the rich content newspapers
make available freely on the Web (Nel).

The sad reality here is that most people choose to just access the free light

content. This in return brings me to my main argument. Mobile news and mobile
platform consumption is an inferior good. They are so in that they only provide
limited information and usually dont capture our full grasp as old methods like
newspaper or Television would. Presently, it appears that many people, particularly
those aged 18 to 34, are more likely to use smartphones to get their news than they
are to use any other source (Shim). The rapid growth of mobile phones as a source
of news has not only altered the way in which people consume news, however; it
has also changed the landscape of news media content, as the news content of
mobile devices for example in mobile news apps, predominantly consists of soft
news, particularly entertainment news (Shim).
But, if we consider other "inferior good" examples such as fast food we notice
something. People use inferior goods when they need to and that is it. When normal
goods are not as readily available or affordable. Contrary to what the term "inferior"
often implies in everyday language, inferior goods offer functional and convenient
but limited alternatives. If one compares online news use with fast-food
consumption, their similarities become self-evident (Chyi). Visitors to newspaper
sites do not stay around for long. In late 2007, a typical visitor to NYTimes.com, over
the course of a month, browsed the site for a total of 34 minutes and 53 seconds;

Our Mobile World Consumption


Christian Casillas

this is only about 68 seconds per day. How much news and information can you
really gather from just 68 seconds or reading and browsing? One survey probed the
reasons why some online news users preferred the online format over the print
edition, and the vast majority of the respondents mentioned "convenience (Chyi).
A 2006 Pew survey asked regular Internet news users what sets the Internet
apart as a news medium, and the top-ranked response was "accessibility and
convenience (Chyi). These studies suggest that the core value, or the competitive
advantage, of online news lies in its convenience more than anything else. Most
users perceive online news as convenient, just as fast food is perceived as quick and
easy. It is not surprising that for this reason users take advantage of the inferior
good for their content.
But as the fastest growing communication medium of all times, the Internet
is not only changing people's personal lifestyles and needs, but is also reshaping the
interdependence between individuals, media, and society (Patwardhan).
Dependency is the flip side of control. As we argue for greater consumer
empowerment and control over what media content we consume in Internet
environments, we are also more likely to grow increasingly dependent on its
resources to meet our goals (Patwardhan). In terms of individual-media
relationships that develop over time, our study suggests tenable connections
between individual goals and dependency on Internet resources. On average,
Internet users did display moderately intense Internet Dependency Relations,
indicating that the medium has become an integral part of individuals media

Our Mobile World Consumption


Christian Casillas

environments according to research done by the Internet Dependency Relations


team (Patwardhan).
This dependency on Internet and mobile usage also has an effect in the
physiological. A study examined a boundary condition and an underlying
mechanism that determines the amount of aggression reported by mobile game
players (Yoon). The findings underscored that the same form or the same content of
media could have a different impact on individuals in different consuming
environments. In other words, participants emotional reactions varied not only
based on the media content itself, but also on inherent media characteristics or
situations in which these games were played (Yoon). More importantly, the feelings
of presence stemming from the characteristics of the gaming played a big role in
producing effects on human aggression. Aggression was shown to increase when
players actively participate in the game versus simply watching; situational factors
that are associated with the way people engage in interactive media cause short-
term shifts in the consumers aggression (Yoon).
Conclusion:


As we see here with the rapid increase of mobile devices and applications our
society has quickly converged into the mobile realm. And not to say that the mobile
apps and features arent good but they are limited and truly alter our lives weather
we see it now or not. In the long run if we dont correct the way we consume news
or media and balance our sources and energy our society as a whole could collapse
both economically and structurally. Already 39 of the top 50 digital news websites

Our Mobile World Consumption


Christian Casillas

have more traffic to their mobile sites and associated applications then their prints
or broadcast. Those aged 18 to 34, are already more likely to use smartphones to get
their news than they are to use any other source. And typical visitors to online news
sited only browse the site for a total of 34 minutes and 53 seconds, a sad 68 seconds
per day. We have to understand that mobile platforms and mobile consumption can
only offers us watered down information and news and not the whole picture. We
cant abandon newspapers, Television and news broadcast. Mobile platforms are a
good quick solution but not one that is fully sufficient in its self.




























Our Mobile World Consumption


Christian Casillas

Personal Reflection:


Personally after doing this research throughout the semester and reading all
the facts I was honestly instilled with fear. We as modern day humans fail to realize
the full picture of certain matters sometimes. If we never purchase a newspaper
anymore how can a news company survive? If we never go to the movie theatres
how will production companies fund their films? If we all just read little tweets
instead of a full article how will we really understand what is going on in the real
world around us? Mobility is a great thing, dont get me wrong, but its a supplement
not a primary source. We should treat it as something to peak our interest into
reality but now be the reality we desire to live. Even when looking at the studies of
how mobile gaming can affect aggression we really need to start educating our lives
better and trust more in the sources that have brought us this far.










Our Mobile World Consumption


Christian Casillas

Annotated Bibliography:


1. Mitchell, A. (2015, April 28). State of the News Media 2015. Retrieved November
4, 2015.

This source is the State of the News Media 2015 twelfth edition annual report by the
Pew Research Centers Journalism Project examining the landscape of American
journalism. This study includes 13 data-filled fact sheets, each of which provides the
latest audience, economic, news investment and ownership trends for key sectors of
news media, from cable TV to African-American media to news magazines. This
study also includes a searchable Media & News Indicators database.

2. Horrigan, J. (2009, March 24). The Mobile Difference. Retrieved November 4,
2015.

This source gravitates to wireless and mobile access and how we use it to
supplement our home high-speed wired connections, the supply of and demand for
online content increases. Institutions, whether governments or news organizations
have greater incentives to optimize their services to be consumed online. More
people have greater opportunity to share their advice, creativity, and observations
online. Recent research argues that exclusion from the network of people and
information found online is more costly than in the past. In this typology, four
groups making up 42% of the population have both below average levels of
broadband and uses of mobile and online resources.

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Christian Casillas


3. Tryon, C. (2012). 'Make any room your TV room': Digital delivery and media
mobility. 'Make Any Room Your TV Room': Digital Delivery and Media Mobility, 287-
300.

This source is about how media companies have begun to appropriate models of the
active and engaged viewer in order to sell mobile technologies and platforms as
offering greater freedom and control over how we watch. They do this by promoting
the concept of platform mobility, which is defined as the ability for media to move
seamlessly between multiple platforms, so that a user can start watching a movie on
one platform and finish it on another. Although it is difficult to measure how widely
the tools of platform mobility are actually being used, I argue that the depiction of
the empowered, mobile spectator has a powerful effect on the cultural imagination.
While mobile technologies can be liberating, they must also be normalized and
domesticated, often through advertising.

4. Goggin, G., Martin, F., & Dwyer, T. (2014). Locative News. Journalism Studies, 41-
59.

This source is about how location, locality, and localism have long been important
characteristics of news, and how their functions have been given a dramatic twist
with the advent of locative, mobile media. The capabilities of mobile media devices
to determine, sense, incorporate, and conjure with the relative locations of reporting

Our Mobile World Consumption


Christian Casillas

and audiences have emerged as key to alternative, small and large-scale networked
newsgathering and dissemination ventures. This paper explores the kinds of places
and spaces these mobile worlds of news making and consumption entail and how
news is being located in and through such new nobilities.

5. Nel, F., & Westlund, O. (n.d.). The 4C's Of Mobile News. Journalism Practice, 744-
753.

This source is about how newspapers are in flux. Having seen their traditional
businesses battered by forces that include structural changes fuelled by the rapid
growth of networked digital technologies and cyclical shifts in the economy,
mainstream news publishers have intensified efforts to adapt their journalism
processes and products. However, growing digital revenue streams to match, if not
surpass, the losses in print circulation and advertising incomes has proved difficult.
A bright or at least not quite so dim spot glows from mobile devices. Drawing on
data from an annual audit conducted in 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011, this article
examines how 66 metropolitan newspapers in England, Scotland, Wales and
Northern Ireland have performed with respect to channels, content, conversation
and commerce of mobile news. While findings show the expansion of newspapers'
mobile endeavors, these are uneven and characterized by repurposing existing
content and duplicating traditional commercial models.

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Christian Casillas

6. Struckmann, S., & Karnowski, V. (n.d.). News consumption in changing media


ecology: An MESM-study on mobile news. Telematics and Informatics, 309-319.

This source is on news consumption across all sorts of media and how
communication scholars have researched it for decades; analyzing its effects, and
describing shifts in news consumption behavior mostly regarding changes in the
media ecology. These days, we are witnessing another major change in the media
ecology: the rise of mobile media. The fast and widespread diffusion of
smartphones, tablets, and the likes is influencing news media consumption being
able to bring news consumption into niches in time and space. This paper
concentrates on the interplay of those niches, i.e., usage situations and the actual
news consumption, therefore analyzing the influence of situational characteristics
on communication device choice for news consumption.

7. Shim, H., You, K., Lee, J., & Go, E. (n.d.).Why do people access news with mobile
devices? Exploring the role of suitability perception and motives on mobile news
use. Telematics and Informatics, 108-117.

This source is a present study that explores the structural relationships among
mobile users perceptions of the suitability of two types of mobile news (political
feature news and entertainment news), users motivations for mobile news usage,
and their behavioral patterns. Our findings show that two types of perceived
suitability for mobile news, particularly for political feature news, are strongly

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Christian Casillas

associated with all dimensions of motivations for mobile news usage. Its findings
show that the information-seeking motive is the very factor that determines mobile
news usage. The results also reveal that the accessibility motive mediates the
relationship between the perceived suitability of obtaining news via a mobile device
and users mobile news behavior. However, contrary to our expectation, the social
utility motive does not mediate the relationship between users perceptions of the
suitability of mobile devices for this purpose and their mobile news usage. Finally,
the information-seeking and accessibility motives each have an indirect effect on the
association between perceived suitability and mobile news usage. The implications
of the study and recommendations for future research are also discussed.

8. Yoon, G., & Ham, C. (2015). Consuming Entertainment Media: How Media Effects
Can Vary by Users Controllability. Current Psychology Curr Psychol.

This source is a study regarding the influence of situational variables on human
aggression. Regarding online gaming, the present study examines how game users
aggression is influenced by two variables: degree of control (playing vs. watching)
and degree of interaction (alone vs. together). The feeling of presence is also
examined as a mediator to explicate the mechanism through which these situational
variables influence the game users levels of aggression. The results demonstrate
that degree of control significantly affects users aggression. Aggression is increased
when players actively participate in the game versus simply watching; situational
factors that are associated with the way people engage in interactive media cause

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Christian Casillas

short-term shifts in players aggression. Implications and future research directions


are discussed.

9. Broersma, M. (2012). SOCIAL MEDIA AS BEAT. Retrieved November 9, 2015.

This article is about how the newspaper industry is in crisis and less time and
resources are available for newsgathering, social media turn out to be a convenient
and cheap beat for journalism. This article investigates the use of Twitter as a source
for newspaper coverage of the 2010 British and Dutch elections. Almost a quarter of
the British and nearly half of the Dutch candidates shared their thoughts, visions,
and experiences on Twitter. Subsequently, these tweets were increasingly quoted in
newspaper coverage. We present a typology of the functions tweets have in news
reports: they were either considered newsworthy as such, were a reason for further
reporting, or were used to illustrate a broader news story. Consequently, we will
show why politicians were successful in producing quotable tweets. While this
paper, which is part of a broader project on how journalists (and politicians) use
Twitter, focuses upon the coverage of election campaigns, our results indicate a
broader trend in journalism. In the future, the reporter who attends events, gathers
information face-to-face, and asks critical questions might instead aggregate
information online and reproduce it in journalism discourse thereby altering the
balance of power between journalists and sources.

Our Mobile World Consumption


Christian Casillas

10. Muthukumaraswamy, K. (n.d.). When The Media Meet Crowds Of Wisdom.


Journalism Practice, 48-65.

This article is about an increasingly digital world where many are predicting the
demise of the traditional newspaper, the media are turning to the masses to report
and help report through the power of Internet journalism. Taking their cues from
other areas such as photography and science, news organizations are employing the
increasingly popular concept of crowdsourcing where tasks traditionally
performed by employees are outsourced to a large network of people, recruited
through an open call. This paper examines five different cases of crowd-sourced
journalism, classified on the basis of type of coverage and audience demographic.
The study explores the strategies employed in each case, analyzes the benefits and
pitfalls, and offers suggestions and ideas for future ventures. Observations and
insights from journalists in different organizations are used to evaluate how
crowdsourcing is blurring the lines between journalists as reporters and citizens as
consumers.

11. Steensen, S. (n.d.). Online Journalism And The Promises Of New Technology.
Journalism Studies, 311-327.

This source is about research of online journalism that has been dominated by a
discourse of technological innovation. The success of online journalism is often
measured by the extent to which it utilizes technological assets like interactivity,

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Christian Casillas

multimedia and hypertext. This paper critically examines the technologically


oriented research about online journalism in the second decade of its existence. The
aim is twofold. First, to investigate to what degree online journalism, as it is
portrayed in empirical research, utilizes new technology more than previously.
Second, the paper points to the limitations of technologically oriented research and
suggests alternative research approaches that might be more effective in explaining
why online journalism develops as it does.

12. Dutta-Bergman, M. (n.d.). Complementarity in Consumption of News Types
Across Traditional and New Media. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 41-
60.

This source is about a research on the relationship between traditional and new
media that builds upon the competition-based displacement theory, based on the
argument that media types compete with each other for resources. This paper takes
an alternative approach and suggests the idea of media complementarity. Media
complementarity implies congruence between the consumption of online and
traditional media within a specific content domain. The results demonstrate support
for media complementarity/ with users of online news in a specific content area
also being more likely to seek out news in the same area from traditional media
outlets.

Our Mobile World Consumption


Christian Casillas

13. Patwardhan, P., & Yang, J. (n.d.). Internet Dependency Relations and Online
Consumer Behavior. Journal of Interactive Advertising, 57-69.

This study introduces Internet Dependency Relations (IDR) as a predictor of online
consumer activities. IDR is based on the theoretical perspective of Media System
Dependency theory, which postulates dependency relations between individuals
and media based on the perceived helpfulness of media in meeting understanding
(social/self), orientation (action/interaction) and play (social/solitary) goals. Using
a cross-sectional email survey of 166 respondents randomly drawn from the faculty,
staff, and student population at a large mid-western university in the United States,
the predictive influence of IDR on online shopping, chatting, and news reading was
empirically tested. On average, consumers in the survey had bought eight products
online in the last six months, spent twenty-one minutes daily reading news online,
and chatted ten minutes daily on the Internet. They also displayed moderate, though
positive dependency relations with the Internet. IDR significantly explained online
shopping activities and online news reading, but did not predict online chatting. In
terms of specific IDR goal dimensions, the predictive influence of action orientation
on online shopping, solitary play on online chatting, and social understanding on
online news reading was confirmed.

14. Chyi, H., & Yang, M. (2009). Is Online News an Inferior Good? Examining the
Economic Nature of Online News among Users. Journalism & Mass Communication
Quarterly, 594-612.

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Christian Casillas

This article talks about how the U.S. newspaper industry is transitioning from print
to online, and how the response to online news has fallen short of expectations and
thus raised questions about the economic viability of the new medium. This study
explores the economic concept of "inferior goods" and its applicability to online
news consumption. Analysis of Pew Research Center survey data shows that as
income increases, consumption of online news decreases, other things being equal.
For that reason this article believes online news is an inferior good among users.

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