UK Professors measure the tyranny of offline boredom versus the pleasure of continuous connectivity via everyware mobile digital tools and toys.
A new study released this week from the London School of Economics and the University of New England has concluded that mobile phone users are not stressed or anxious by virtue of being always-on. On the contrary, researchers found that having access to data and voice communication via smartphones actually decreases stress, in part because of how it fills “dead time.”
This phenomenon is connected to what researcher Michael Bull called the evolution of the “culture of no dead air,” resulting from the widespread adoption of iPods and other portable mp3 music players. In his analysis, Bull describes how continuous consumption of a private soundtrack while moving through public spaces, profoundly affects one’s orientation and daily urban experience of time and space.
Connectivity withdrawal and mundane dead-air results in moments of (what Motorola calls) microboredom for those accustomed to having always-on digital music, texting, gaming and the like. Handheld gizmos and gadgets offer to “saturate” those fleeting free moments with “productivity, communication, and digital distractions,” observes Carolyn Y. Johnson, in The Boston Globe. “Today, distraction from monotony is not merely available,” Johnson writes, “it is almost unavoidable.”
In the UK study released this week, rather than experiencing mobile digital gadgets as an electronic leash, or irritating disruption, university researchers Michael Bittman, Judith Brown, and Judy Wajcman learned of the comfort and pleasure in continuous connectivity experienced by heavy users of mobile technology. The British Professors concluded that smartphone devices such as Blackberrys and iPhones, though “originally marketed as business tools” have today evolved into “instruments for life.”
What we might call, the mLife.
In 2002 AT&T spent millions on a rebranding campaign by Ogilvy and Mather called “What is the mLife?” for their emergent wireless services (which, incidentally, resulted in a lawsuit by MetLife). To increase the authenticity of the spots, O&M sent cultural anthropologists on a field research mission, to observe young people (the target demographic) using cellphones. The result was a campaign that used “M” to stand for “multitasking” and “modern”– two attributes of a (at that point, mostly science futural, or at the very least, not yet mainstream) lifestyle enhanced by mobile communications technology.
A provocative and terrifically expensive 60-second Super Bowl advert for the campaign suggested, “We are meant to lead a wireless life. Now we truly can. Welcome to mLife.” (You can watch the Super Bowl spot archived on Spike.) Predictably this TV ad resulted in a wave of traffic to the company website, as audiences followed through to find out what an “mLife” was: the total 34,000 hits on the Saturday before the game rose by 1900% to 681,000 hits on gameday.
To underscore the velocity of the revolution in mobile technology, we might consider that at the time of the mLife campaign just seven years ago, Andre Dahan, president of AT&T’s mobile multimedia services unit, explained that “the vast majority of people do not yet know that they can use wireless technologies other than voice to connect with people and information.”
Some of intriguing teaser spots from the AT&T/O&M mLife print media campaign are available in David Modell’s online portfolio.
In a related 2009 study of mobile culture trends, researchers found that the majority of websites that mobile users visit are entertainment related. Although light users of the mobile Internet tend to access educational and informational web content on their cellphones, heavy users gravitate toward the fun stuff. 58% of these “heavy” mobile users surveyed were males, in the 18-44 demographic. This gendering of mCulture is consistent with figures released this week by Ipsos Rei, in their poll of Canadian mobile Internet users. That poll found that men were not only more likely to access the mobile web, but they also do so more frequently than female mWeb users (5x vs. 4x daily), and men stay online longer than females do (15 minutes vs. 10).
Interestingly, the Canadian poll revealed that, although the mLife is (increasingly) mainstream, it is perhaps not as ubiquitous as marketers would have us believe. Today, only 1 in 6 online Canadians (17%) access the Internet on a daily basis from a handheld device.
