Mobile Me & You- Instant Messaging apps: Western Europe edition (part 7)
We live in a society where mobile phones have won a permanent place in our lives. Nowadays, they seem to have become a necessity for most people and especially for millennials. Thus, it has been a very interesting task for us to explore the “relationship” that young people have with their mobile phones, in the framework of New Consuming Trends course of Panteion University, taught by our professor Mrs Betty Tsakarestou. During this course our team participated on a research project called Mobile Me and You concerning mobile collaborative consumption and sharing economy that are now on the rise. My team specifically chose to focus our part of the research on the use of instant messaging apps.
During our project, we conducted interviews with people from Europe and Latin America. On this article we are going to examine the insights we collected from Western Europe. So, let’s see the mobile life of two millennials from Netherlands and Belgium.
Anna is a 22 year old girl from the Netherlands and studies cinema in Amsterdam. She texts constantly during the day mainly for work, but also with her friends and family. It’s really interesting to mention that she turns off her phone during weekends and she doesn’t mind if her phone was taken away because for her it’s crucial only for work. She uses agenda to schedule and WhatsApp for work and college. She is from the ones that prefers laptop over her phone and she’s hesitant in sharing anything about her life, so she only shares some things on Instagram in a small group of people. “My phone is a part of my professional life” she says.
She believes that mobile phone isn’t a must for our lives because our real friends can find us either we have phones or not. She feels connected international as a professional but mobile disconnects her from reality. She uses sharing apps like Airbnb and an app where food leftovers are bought, so they are not thrown (2good2go). She doesn’t follow any influencers, but she follows movements, like LGBT rights, because she wants to influence in what’s been told by the media, to give attention into those kinds of things. She does online shopping and mainly buys secondhand clothes. She shares the same habits with her friends and she prefers Instagram over Facebook.
Christophe De Coster is a 23 year old history student from Belgium, who uses his phone all day long. He thinks mobile phone as destruction for millennials, because they are checking it all the time. For work and college he uses Facebook Messenger and for pictures from archives for his thesis he uses camera. He likes mobile because you can take it everywhere but he prefers laptops for work and for watching videos. He shares videos, photos and memes and he admits that when he is bored with his friends they grab their phones.
He feels a strong connectivity, because with phone you can communicate with people that you can’t in real life. He doesn’t use sharing apps because once he had a bad incident so he doesn’t trust them. He follows some influencers and when he does online shopping he prefers his laptop, because is more trustable. More or less he shares the same mobile habits with his friends.
When it comes on instant messaging apps his favorite ones are WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, because of them he can communicate and organize his life. He chats with his friends about jokes and news like he does in face to face contact and he makes groups to organize trips and appointments. He loves the messaging apps experience because of the feeling of being all the time with friends. He prefers Messenger because it’s connected with Facebook and he uses it a lot, but, surprisingly, he didn’t mention Instagram. He likes WhatsApp, but Messenger is more user-friendly and this is vital for an everyday user. He admits that he could find other ways to communicate, but would miss the phone. Finally, for academic purposes, he thinks that only WhatsApp is suitable, because Messenger is connected with Facebook.
Watch Christophe’s interview here.
To sum up, we can point out that in Western Europe the ideas about mobile life differ from country to country. Some of them consider their phones less important than others, but in the end of the day mobile phones makes the life of every interviewee better and easier.
These interviews were only two of the ten that we conducted for this project. If you found them interesting you can continue your reading on the other articles of myself or the ones of my teammates Athena Styllou and Konstantina Nikolopoulou on the links below.
