Approaching Mobile Users. Connecting ICT Uses with Everyday Mobility

This study aims to develop an analytical framework to help better our understanding of the relationships between ICT use and everyday mobility. In the first part of this paper, we argue that current ICT-focused audience research generally fails to understand ‘mobile users’ fully, i.e., how physical mobility shapes and is shaped by media and ICT uses in everyday life. Researchers in the field usually focus on portable phones, studying the consequences of personal ownership and permanent availability in diverse areas including social relationships and social boundaries (between home and work, between private and public communications). Yet we shall demonstrate that little is known about how individuals make use/sense of media and ICTs in the context of their everyday mobility. The second part of this paper proposes an analytical framework that fully recognizes the crucial part played by media and ICTs in everyday mobility. The framework was built both theoretically and empirically. Sociological studies on everyday mobility and communication studies on portable ICTs were reviewed and linked together in order to identify key dimensions along which mobile users could be analyzed. In addition, we conducted exploratory interviews with young adults living in Brussels in order to evaluate and refine the different dimensions of the framework. We used a user-centred approach, embracing the range of media and ICTs – including (online) services provided by public transport companies and user associations – that individuals use in the context of everyday mobility. The proposed analytical framework points out the following four interrelated areas of research on mobile users: (1) The ‘modulation of travel time’ points to the fact that action at a distance can complement travel and co-presence, and sometimes even substitute for them. At the same time, ICT use can enlarge one’s social and professional networks, and hence increase overall travel time and need for co-presence. (2) The ‘management of travelling’ refers to the appropriation of media and ICTs for managing time and space constraints, choosing modes of transportation, coordinating with other travellers, etc. Travelling can be routinized, planned or improvised, all involving media and ICTs in different ways. (3) The ‘experience of travelling’ refers to the meanings that people attribute to travel time and the various activities that can be carried out during travel time. Increasingly, media and ICTs are part of the experience of travelling. (4) The ‘conduct of travelling’ refers to the ways in which people deal with the cognitive, physical, and social constraints of travelling. These constraints shape media and ICT uses during travel time. The framework also puts forward three secondary dimensions that cut across the four axes of analysis defined above: (1) the social, economic and discursive resources that influence individuals’ mobility and ICT use (perception of time and space, representations of mobility and technology, position in the life course, etc.); (2) the activities during/between which mobility and ICT use occur (domestic activities, leisure activities, and work activities); and (3) the social relationships, which shape and are shaped by both mobility and ICT use.