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Usage patterns of mobile phones in Israel position them as instruments of great importance and as everyday, multipurpose, and interpersonal devices. This study utilizes a critical perspective of the “uses and gratifications” approach to explore the usage of and gratification sought from smartphone usage of millennials. Sixty personal in-depth interviews were conducted during 2013 with millennials (undergraduate students) with the primary goal of exploring millennials’ perceptions of smartphone usages, as well as their personal experiences with smartphones and the role of smartphones in their lives. A grounded theory approach was used to analyze students’ reflections on the roles of smartphones in their lives. Participants have expressed a great bonding with their smartphone and relationships that can be described in term of "love and hate.” The thematic analysis highlighted the addictive elements of using their smartphone, that is, using it more frequently and under undesired circumstances than one would like to, and even becoming anxious about losing the device or even getting too far away from it. Other leading themes included the influence of external pressures to use smartphones, the varied usefulness that smartphones serve in participants’ lives, and a strong sense of "Fear of missing out" as an explanation for their extensive use of their smartphones. The findings of this chapter indicate that smartphones have become an indispensable medium among young adults, used due to practical, as well as to emotional reasons; inner, as well as external impulses.

Smartphones play an integral part in many children's lives. Their constant presence in various contexts and the multitude of affordances they present have a tremendous effect on how childhoods are lived today. One important aspect is the way children's interaction with smartphones can affect relationships and particularly generational relations. In this explorative study, we investigated Azerbaijani children's interaction with smartphones in the family and at school using the sociomaterial and relational approaches. Thinking relationally, we followed children's stories to unravel how smartphones can mediate different types of behavior and assist children in negotiating their place in generational order with the adults in their lives. Analyses suggest that smartphones can both present children with bargaining power to negotiate pleasure and fun as well as means to reinforce the generational order by children themselves. The findings point out that children often transfer social norms and expectations placed on them to the ways they use smartphones.

With an extensive range of information available at the swipe of a finger, the smartphone has become a ubiquitous tool for augmenting conversation. Users of English as a lingua franca (ELF) often rely on such technology to help establish friendships by using them to sustain intersubjectivity. But how do they manage the multiple involvements this entails, such as participating in current talk while searching for linguistic items?

This study employs multimodal Conversation Analysis to undertake a detailed account of the way two young people, a Japanese male (22) and an Indonesian male (16) incorporate smartphones into their lingua franca English interaction. The analysis is based on naturally occurring conversations video-recorded by the Japanese participant, while both boys were living with an American homestay family.

The analysis explores the role of the smartphone in forward-oriented repair, including how the interactants, look up unfamiliar words, delay turn progressivity to fit those words into the turn-in-progress, and use images to accompany an unclear term. Speakers also occasionally abandon a look-up in order to reformulate the turn without the smartphone, relying instead on their own interactional competence.

The study offers insight into the way young people use smartphones as an affordance to manage and repair aspects of their L2 talk, enabling them to enhance their current interactional competence by drawing on the vast range of semiotic resources the phone possesses. Ensuring understanding is essential for developing and maintaining friendships, and for this particular peer culture of lingua franca English speakers, smartphones are a key tool for accomplishing that. As such, the study will be of interest to researchers and educators in the fields of both technology and interaction.

This chapter focuses on how the idea of ‘an ordinary day in the life’ can serve as an entry point for understanding media use. I discuss how everyday media use can be conceptualized as mundane and meaningful, and as most easily noticed when changing. Building on day-in-the-life interview segments from qualitative studies, I discuss methodological merits and challenges of this approach. The analysis follows media users an ordinary day from morning to night, as they wake up with the smartphone, navigate across social domains, and seek connection and companionship. I argue that seemingly mundane media use practices are made meaningful through the connection they entail, and particularly discuss the conflicted position of smartphone checking in everyday life. The chapter empirically substantiates the arguments made in Chapter 1 about the centrality of smartphones in digital everyday lives.

This chapter presents the research questions, approaches, and arguments of the book, asking how our everyday lives with media have changed after the smartphone. I introduce the topic of media use in everyday life as an empirical, methodological, and theoretical research interest, and argue for its continued centrality to our digital society today, accentuated by datafication. I discuss how the analytical concepts of media repertories and public connection can inform research into media use in everyday life, and what it means that our societies and user practices are becoming more digital. The main argument of the book is that digital media transform our navigation across the domains of everyday life by blurring boundaries, intensifying dilemmas, and affecting our sense of connection to communities and people around us. The chapter concludes by presenting the structure of the rest of the book, where these arguments will be substantiated in analysis of media use an ordinary day, media use in life phase transitions, and media use when ordinary life is disrupted.

This chapter presents theoretical and empirical studies that investigate the influence of digital culture on the educational process of university students where mobile devices and the internet have become increasingly present as resources in everyday school life. The researchers investigate how such devices and the internet interact with university environments in ways that change the more traditional academic practices, such as reading, writing, and studying. Moreover, in the context of what has been widely labeled as humanities studies, interest has grown in understanding how “culture” may be studied via varied strands of interpretative lines of inquiry, each configured by different methods and ways of reflection. At master education levels, digital technology becomes even more present as a means of academic activity and, as a result, amplifies the impacts of digital culture on contemporary university culture. The purpose of this work is to study the concept of culture, digital culture, and scholarly culture, and, on a second approach, to review aspects of the development of communication methods and their impacts on university educational environments. As a methodological theoretical procedure, this research builds on authors who have raised practical and scholarly cultural questions, such as Pierre Bourdieu, Pierre Levy, Raymond Williams, Roger Chartier, Anne Marie Chartier, and Bernard Lahire, among others. This study engages in empirical research with students in an Advertising and Marketing course in a private higher educational institution in the city of Araraquara, which is located in the “interior” of the state of São Paulo in Brazil.

This chapter explores the use of experience sampling method (ESM) in a qualitative research design, departing from reflections on ontological and epistemological aspects of the tourist experience. It suggests that the tourist experience can be studied in its ordinary moments and proposes the use of ESM to capture such experience of “everydayness.” The chapter illustrates how the method can be used and provides some guidelines for its implementation, drawing examples from a qualitative study on tourists' smartphone use that combines ESM questionnaires with semi-structured interviews. ESM consists of sending participants several micro-questionnaires at random times during their trip, asking questions about their experience and perceptions. Thanks to modern mobile technologies, the method can be used on participants' own smartphones, through various programmable applications. The method allows to inquire into aspects of experience that the participants themselves may not be aware of, or may fail to recollect after the trip, thus increasing ecological validity and reducing recall bias.

Malta has long been a tourist destination with visitors totaling 2.6 million in 2018. A 2013 survey by the Malta Tourism Authority found that 22% of tourists opted for a rental car during their stay, whereas 76% chose public transport to meet their travel needs. In recent years, the modernization of the bus fleet, improved information provision, and the introduction of a ferry service in the Valletta harbors, have contributed to the increased appeal of public transport. However, the increase in independent tourists might give rise to an increase in the rentals of individual cars. This is a concern given Malta’s high car ownership, and its ever-increasing congestion problem. As part of the CIVITAS DESTINATIONS Project, focused on tourist sustainable mobility, the University of Malta developed a Tourist Mobility smartphone application: MyMaltaPlan. The app enables tourists to plan trips and schedule itineraries between touristic sites. The app, which was launched in the summer of 2019, aims to encourage a shift toward greener travel behavior. A survey was conducted with tourists to understand current tourist travel behavior, and tourists’ use of smartphone or web applications for trip planning. The vast majority of visitors own a smartphone and use it on holiday to plan, access, or book transport. To test the app’s functionalities, a focus group was held with a group of volunteers who shared their experiences in a group discussion. Participants appreciated the automatically created itinerary but noted that to truly promote sustainable mobility, the app should be able to provide the full picture of available alternatives.