and … let me think … what’s a word to describe a good phone that lasts a long time?” she asked. “Dependable,” she uttered.
Antonio told the group that his iPod was his favorite device. “I listen to music while playing video games,” Antonio said. “I don’t play on a computer, because I don’t really use it at home, because it’s just always being used and I never really get a chance.” He explained that the touch screen function was broken on his iPod, “so I can’t lock it, or listen to music with it, so I just chose my top five hundred songs of mine and I put them on this [an older iPod Nano]. And now I just listen to those.” The three words Antonio chose to describe his iPod were “creative, life, and relaxing.”
The pictures that students drew and the stories that accompanied them were a revealing window into the world that we had entered. We strongly suspected that the use of mobile technologies by students, while active, was likely to be structured by complex social, financial, and familial circumstances. The focus group provided some early clues that this hypothesis was not only viable but quite likely in the world that students made at Freeway. While it was clear that the students in our sample used a variety of mobile technologies, it was also clear that the contexts and circumstances—familial flux, economic constraints, and rundown devices—in which they adopted mobile technologies greatly influenced their practices.
Over the course of the year we discovered that mobile media matter in the lives of young people at Freeway in ways that are both obvious and not so obvious. For instance, it was not surprising to learn that mobile devices were the principal gateway to connecting with peers through texting, Facebook, and Twitter. Popular apps like Instagram and Snapchat emerged during the fieldwork and analysis phase of our research. Both Instagram and Snapchat were predicated on the stories that surfaced in the icebreaker exercise described above: teens’ interactions with peers and pop culture occur primarily through smartphones. But we also learned that among some students mobile is a crucial node in the informal learning ecologies that they designed and the creative practices that they pursued. In addition to being a lifeline to friends, mobile was a lifeline to learning and creating media.
Teens and Mobile Phone Adoption
One of the major social and technological shifts since the mid-2000s has been the growing number of young children and teens who own their own mobile devices including iPods, tablets, and, of course, smartphones.2 To gain a fuller view of the central role of mobile in the lives of children and teens, consider the teen mobile adoption studies conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life project.
In 2004, according to Pew, 45 percent of twelve- to seventeen-year-olds owned a mobile phone.3 By 2015 roughly three in four teens, or 73 percent, owned a smartphone.4 The mobile phone, in a relatively short period of time, emerged as the central hub of teen life, serving variously as the center for peer interaction and communication, identity work, and media consumption.5 Moreover, the racial, ethnic, and class dimensions associated with mobile adoption are noteworthy. While young people in general have migrated to mobile devices, black and Latino youths’ engagement is especially active compared with that of their white counterparts.
As our fieldwork unfolded, the mobile landscape was shifting. For example, Pew explained that even though teens from higher-income households were slightly more likely to own a mobile phone, “parent income levels do not map as neatly with smartphone ownership among teens.”6 Teens living in the lowest-earning households (under $30,000 per year) were about as likely as teens living in the highest-earning households ($75,000 or more) to own smartphones (39 percent vs. 43 percent).7 Smartphone ownership among Latino and black teens was higher than that of their white counterparts. Whereas 43 percent and 40 percent, respectively, of Latino and black teens owned a smartphone, only 35 percent of white teens did.8 The adoption of mobile devices among Latino and African Americans transformed their engagement with the digital world and rewrote the digital divide narrative.
Teens have been a prominent and persistent thread in the study of mobile phones.9 The implications of mobile platforms for learning, living, connectivity, and opportunity are striking. In this chapter we focus on five themes that emerged from our initial deep dive into the data that we collected related to the mobile lives and practices of Freeway students. The first two themes map some of the broader trends that shape the mobile lives of black and Latino teens. The final three themes offer specific accounts of the mobile practices that we observed during our fieldwork.
First, we consider the mobile paradox, a reference to the ironies associated with black and Latino youth adoption of mobile technologies.10 The mobile media ecologies and practices that we discovered embody the hallmark features of both early adoption and late adoption, a fact that animates the degree to which the use of mobile devices in resource-constrained communities is contradictory and complex. The next section considers the influence of mobile technologies in the rising rates of teen media consumption, most notably among African American and Latino youth. The chapter then addresses the role of mobile in the classroom. Even though the school district adopted strict policies against the use of personal mobile devices in the classroom, the everyday reality at Freeway was that students remained tethered to their handhelds even when they were in class.
In the next section we explore the mobile “learning and creative” ecologies that students established. Even though the school district banned mobile as part of the learning environment, a few students in our study adopted mobile as a key node in their informal learning and creative pursuits. Finally, precarious familial and economic circumstances render access to mobile technologies tenuous for many youth in lower-income households. Financial barriers to handheld devices aside, we discovered a set of creative and improvisational practices that some Freeway students employed to gain access to the devices, media content, and peer connections that make mobile the central artery of teen social life. We refer to this as the making of an informal sharing economy.
The Mobile Paradox
The relationship between social inequality and media adoption is increasingly complex. Lower-income and lower-education households remain somewhat less likely than their higher-income and higher-education counterparts to use the Internet, though that particular gap closed considerably throughout the first decade of the new millennium. However, when you factor in mobile, use of the Internet across categories like household income and education changes as those who are in the lower socioeconomic group are just as likely as, and in some cases more likely than, higher socioeconomic groups to use a mobile phone as the primary gateway to the Internet. We witnessed this trend consistently throughout our fieldwork, which was confirmed by data from the Pew Research Center.
More specifically, Pew measured what it called Internet access “mostly on cell phones.” African American teens (33 percent) were more likely than white (24 percent) or Latino teens (21 percent) to report that they access the Internet mostly on a cell phone.11 Teens from lower-income households (30 percent) were also more likely than teens from higher-income households (24 percent) to report Internet access mostly on a cell phone.12 The key takeaway here is not that teens from higher-income households were not going online from a mobile phone, but rather that they benefit from a wider set of options when they go online from home, especially in the form of high-capacity network connections.
Americans’ use of the Internet via a mobile device began rising sharply after 2007. Roughly one-fifth (24 percent) of Americans used the Internet on a mobile device in 2007.
