Situational Contexts of Mobile Internet Use

The next speaker at AoIR 2015 is Veronika Karnowski, whose focus is on the ubiquitous nature of Internet access in contemporary society. Prior to this, households may have had different mediators as determined by the location of connection plugs; later, patchy wireless availability made Internet use nomadic as we moved between islands of connectivity. Today, use is truly ubiquitous.

This creates substantial variations in place – the surroundings of where we use the Internet are no longer predetermined by connectivity limitations. But scholarship has so far largely failed to take such situational contexts into account. Context-related variables show up in information systems studies from time to time, but are not systematically addressed. We must take location-related conditions into account much more strongly, therefore, including physical environments, social dynamics, and the specific capabilities of localised media connectivity (wifi, 3G, etc.).

Recent studies in Germany found three types of mobile phone usage: mobile at home, en route, and hanging out with peers; as well as three types of mobile Internet usage: on the way, in the homezone, and work or friends. Another study found usage clusters such as one-to-one social interaction, self-organisation, coordination, and music and games, as well as many-to-many interaction and social behaviour.

The latest work focussed on mobile news use and found this to be truly ubiquitous because it does not depend on situational impact. What we need to do further is to identify how different factors influencing mobile uses are interacting with each other.