Mobile Me and You- Instant messaging apps: Get to know our project (Part 1)
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 the 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 regarding 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.
Millennials are, according to the Cambridge dictionary, all people who were born in the 1980s, 1990s, or early 2000s and thus the first generation to come of age in the new millennium. It goes without saying that these people are the first digital natives, the first to experience the internet era as children. Naturally these people are more familiar with technological gadgets than all older generations and we can even notice in our everyday life that they use their mobile phones for a definitely large amount of time and for several different activities. They are the ones to control the new mobile trends and the ones who are now driving the mobile collaborative consumption and the sharing economy.
Collaborative consumption is the peer-to-peer-based activity of obtaining, giving or sharing the access to goods and services, coordinated through community-based online services. Collaborative consumption was enabled due to the development of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and today we can have these activities even via every mobile phone. Sharing economy is exactly this economic system that is based on people sharing possessions and services, either for free or for payment, usually using the internet to organise this.
Along with our overall mobile trends research, we chose with my team to specifically focus on the use of instant messaging apps. Instant messaging (IM) technology is a type of online chat that offers real-time text transmission over the Internet. Needless to say that the Millennials were the most interesting generation for us to examine, since most of them are active users of messaging apps and in general of social media and of all kinds of mobile apps. Thus, they seem to be quite familiar to this sharing economy we live in.
My fellow students and I also belong to this generation and there was no better way for us to start our research than by asking ourselves what our mobile phones mean to us and how we use them on a daily basis. Later on, we posed similar questions to Millennial students from different countries and by the end of our research we conducted in total fourteen interviews.
The topics we mostly examined concern what Millennials with university studies think about their mobile phones as organising agendas, social media, influencers, online shopping and payments, sharing apps (like Uber and Airbnb) and other mobile trends. We also aimed to learn how they feel with and without their phones and of course what kind of content they share with their friends on instant messaging apps and how these apps can be of any help on their academic and professional life. We also made them think if they share similar mobile habits with their peers.
The Millennials we talked to were from different European or Latin American countries and we were able to indicate some differences, but again to realise how much globalisation has turned us into a global village, where every Millennial uses the same more or less apps and has the same mobile habits.
It might be exactly due to this so-called global village we live in that sharing economy is now on a great growth. Especially young people all over the world now use the same apps to communicate with their friends, to share their stories, to express their thoughts, to collaborate on several projects and -why not- to share their apartment, their car, their bike and who knows what else.
This seems to be a new era in economy and it has been a great task for us to conduct at least a small research on this topic and explore the contribution of these “magic” mobile devices we all use in this radical change in our lives.
If you find the topic of our research interesting, you can continue your reading on the other articles of myself or the ones of my teammates Konstantina Nikolopoulou and elena kouki on the links below. You can also visit our website https://mobileimapps.wixsite.com/website .
