Mobile Me: “Dear Diary…” (Part 3.1)
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 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.
The first step on our project was to observe how each one of us, individually, uses their phone and to present a Mobile Me story. As far as I am concerned, I spent a week keeping a diary of my mobile activity and when I realised my recurrent actions on it, I started recording my screen while using my favorite apps. In the end, I found out that most of my screen recordings where on very few specific apps, mostly social media ones.
My Mobile Me diary made me accept the fact that I spend way too much time on my mobile phone and that I feel at least vulnerable when it’s not to be reached at a close distance. I now admit that I would be freaked out if I found myself outside of home without my mobile device on my hands. My favorite social media, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger are proven guilty for this addiction of mine, but it’s definitely not only due to them that I need my phone.
Watch my mobile diary video here.
The main reason that my mobile phone is now like an extension of my hand is that it has been a very useful tool for every part of my life. Not only does it help me stay in touch with my friends, by exchanging text and vocal messages, pictures and gifs on instant messaging apps, but it also helps me collaborate with my peers on several university projects without having to meet in person. For academic reasons I would say I mostly use Messenger when it comes to communication with classmates and on Facebook most professors create groups for their courses, where they inform us for some tasks we have to do or they let us know for any changes on the timetable. Facebook in general is still an environment where I get informed about the news and where I watch plenty of videos and memes, but I can see that its content is changing through the years and I can no longer follow my friends’ lives on it, as the majority of them are now using Instagram. Instagram has also become one of the apps I mostly use, but I don’t favour it over Facebook and I generally don’t like its content. As it concerns mostly pictures, I hate to notice the narcissism it gets out of some people. On the other hand I like watching my friends’ stories sometimes and I like posting photos from my trips.
WhatsApp is also an app that I favor. It is not popular at all in Greece, but since I have many friends from other countries I need it and I use it almost every day. Again for my friends abroad I also have Snapchat, but I find it quite meaningless and I think I’ll soon delete the app from my mobile phone for the fourth or fifth time. Similar is the destiny of Twitter that I keep installing and uninstalling. I have really tried to get interested and used to it in the past, but I always seem to fail. Some other social media apps that I keep on my device are YouTube, where I watch videos from time to time, Medium to read my university colleagues’ articles and an app called Nup, where students from all Greek universities can anonymously share whatever they want with other students. I’ve only recently downloaded this app, but it’s quite interesting as people can anonymously ask and give advice to other Greek students who might share the same interests or problems with them and they can even chat privately with someone and share their opinions.
Some apps that I only use outside of the house are Netflix, that I use when I’m travelling and I need to kill time, Spotify, Google Maps and Moovit. When I need to call a taxi I use Beat when in Greece and Uber when abroad. I order food on E-Food and sometimes I buy flight tickets on the app of Aegean. To keep track of my diet I use Lifesum and to organise my life and mostly my university responsibilities I use Wunderlist. To check the news I have the app of In.gr (for Greece) and Euronews (for global news). I also like opening my e-mails on my mobile phone, but I usually answer them on my computer.
In general I feel I need my mobile phone and I have the urge to always keep it close to me, but when I’m at home I prefer my tablet, where I keep apps that I wouldn’t use as often on my phone and definitely my computer. I feel more safe working on my computer, but again it depends on the activity. For example, I use to take screenshots on my mobile phone when I see a meme that expresses my feelings or a situation my friends find themselves in. Then I can easily send this photo to my friends on Messenger, while if I wouldn’t bother to do the same thing on my computer and gather useless photos on my desktop.
All in all, I believe I am quite addicted to my phone, but it is not something that stresses me, because I know that it really does help me keep my life in order. It helps me keep in my life friends that live in other cities or even other countries and share with them not only the main events of my life, but even the most meaningless ones as if we were living together and it even saves me time when it comes to collaborating for academic or sometimes professional reasons. Thus, I am not really putting an effort on eliminating my screen time, I just try to replace scrolling time with productive and creative time. Because I know mobile phones can be an extremely useful technological tool that can facilitate our lives and we ought to take advantage of it.
If you found my Mobile Me project interesting you can continue to the rest of our research by reading the other articles of myself or the ones of my teammates Konstantina Nikolopoulou and elena kouki on the links below or visit our website https://mobileimapps.wixsite.com/website .
