As mobile media rapidly expand in the rural Global South, digital divide research is shifting from an exclusion-based to an inclusion-based perspective. Drawing on Heeks’ “adverse digital incorporation” framework and ethnographic fieldwork in rural China, this article conceptualizes the third-level digital divide, which refers to the unequal outcomes and disparate dividends derived from information and communication technologies, as the unequal extraction of value resulting from power imbalances within the mobile system. The study reveals that this adverse incorporation constitutes two closed loops of value inequality. On the one hand, smartphones break spatiotemporal boundaries to extract value through the commodification of private time, legibility and labor control, and risk-cost shifting. On the other hand, while rural residents employ strategic digital disconnection as a form of everyday resistance, which results in marginalization and reinforces value inequality. Consequently, it is essential to go beyond technical provision to enable rural residents to transform from passive content consumers into active value producers and to rebalance power within the mobile system.
While digital disconnection and smartphone regulation have gained scholarly attention, little is known about phone setting customizations. Currently, there is inconsistent evidence on whether modifying ringer modes reduces actual smartphone use and digital stress. Some studies suggest that a silent mode can reduce phone attentiveness, whereas others deem it ineffective or counterproductive. Drawing on self-determination theory, we explore the associations between preferred ringer mode, smartphone use (i.e., screen time and number of unlocks), and digital stress, alongside intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. We analyzed data from a quota-based survey of 386 smartphone users in Flanders (Belgium) using structural equation modeling multigroup analyses. Our study revealed few direct associations between preferred ringer mode and smartphone use or digital stress. However, our findings underscore the crucial role of motivation in choosing a ringer mode, revealing multiple significant associations among intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, phone use, and digital stress. We discuss these theoretical and empirical findings in light of self-determination theory.
This article examines the rise of a new generation of mobile service robots that use AI for navigation and communication in public and semipublic spaces. Reviewing the state of the field of service robots and robot scholarship, this paper is a literature-informed commentary on mobile AI service robots as mobile media and their implications for human workers and the public, shared environments, and regulation in everyday spaces. We examine how mobile AI service robots are increasingly appearing in restaurants, hotels, university campuses, and public streets as service workers, tools, and social actors, introducing new modalities of communication, and reshaping spatial relationships, labour practices and power dynamics. These developments raise critical questions about the effect of robots’ communicative acts of movement, interfacing and emotional expression on others, the organisation of labour, and their role in the privatisation and surveillance of space. Ultimately, we argue that as mobile AI becomes embedded in ordinary life and work settings, it necessitates a renewed focus on who benefits, who is displaced, and how these increasingly agentic actors are governed as they become normalised in shared and public spaces.
This study is an exploration of the digital interactions of older widowed women living in rural India, who received free smartphones under a government scheme aimed at empowering marginalized women. Situated within the intersectionality framework, the research is an analysis of how the interplay of age, gender, widowhood, and rural residence shapes these women’s experiences with technology. Based on semistructured interviews with 16 widowed women aged 60–85 years, it was found in the study that the majority of the respondents are not using the smartphones themselves but have passed on the smartphones to younger female family members, citing utility to younger members and sociocultural norms. The study highlights the complex dynamics of digital inclusion in the Global South, where sociocultural factors lead to expectations that women conform to stereotypes about gender, age, and social status (being widowed) and, hence, significantly influence the adoption and use of technology. The study underscores the need for customized digital literacy initiatives that address both technical skills and the cultural stigmas surrounding technology use among older women living in rural areas. The study contributes to the discourse on the digital divide by focusing on a group that embodies several marginalities, offering insights for policy frameworks aimed at equitable digital empowerment.
This article examines how ride-hailing platforms mediate care mobility in everyday contexts, focusing on women-only and mixed-gender services in Chile. Drawing on 37 qualitative interviews with users and drivers, the study shows that caregiving responsibilities are an important yet underexamined reason women engage with these platforms, highlighting the gendered organization of care-related mobility. Participants use apps to coordinate children's routines, assist elderly relatives, and manage everyday travel with limited time, resources, and support. The findings show that these practices extend beyond transport. Women drivers often perform additional unremunerated forms of care, including waiting beyond scheduled times, offering emotional support, and assisting dependents. These interactions reveal how platform-mediated mobility operates across blurred boundaries between paid service and informal care, shaped by gendered expectations around responsibility and care. The article introduces the concept of platformed care to describe how mobile media and mobility platforms are used to coordinate and delegate caregiving-related mobility under conditions of distance and gendered vulnerability. Rather than resolve structural constraints, these platforms reorganize care mobility while reproducing existing inequalities.
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 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.
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.
Since its release in 2016, Pok & eacute;mon 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 Pok & eacute;mon Go research. A total of 393 publications related to Pok & eacute;mon 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 Pok & eacute;mon Go research. Thematic mapping further identified nine prominent research themes, ranging from physical activity and immersive experience to educational applications and safety concerns. As Pok & eacute;mon 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.
This commentary calls for scholarly attention to mobile AI (AI systems embedded in smartphones, apps, and mobility infrastructures) that has been overshadowed by the dominance of PC-based, work- and productivity-focused AI discourse. It argues that such discourse, shaped by technological determinism and U.S.-centrism, limits our understanding of AI’s, especially mobile AI’s, sociotechnical diversity, open-endedness, and deep entanglement with everyday life. To address this gap, the article develops an assemblage-centered lens that foregrounds the contingent and contextual trajectories of AI’s development, application, and social implications. Through three analytical parameters—associated milieu, lock-in, and detachment—and drawing upon the cases of ByteDance’s Doubao and Tencent’s Yuanbao, the article shows how an assemblage-centered lens to mobile AI invites scholars to rethink AI beyond the PC-based, work- and productivity-centered paradigm and to recognize mobile AI's distinctive potential pathways of infrastructuralization in everyday life.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Through the lens of agents, this article situates mobile artificial intelligence (mobile AI) in relation to earlier and ongoing developments with mobile media and communication, including mobile telephony and mobile broadband. With mobile telephony, individuals are directly addressable to one another ("individual addressability"), whereas with mobile broadband, data are addressable to individuals anytime, anywhere ("data addressability"). With mobile AI agents, data are not just addressable to users, but individually addressable to them and the situation at hand ("individual addressability of data"). As social actors that use machine learning to perform tasks requiring humanlike intelligence, mobile AI agents operate at the intersection of addressability among individuals and data, uniquely supporting the "individual addressability of data" and mobile broadband services. As we explain, this development has implications for how individuals connect with people, data, and agents as social actors.
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.
