Mobile Me & You- Instant Messaging apps: Latin America edition(part 5)
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 research we conducted some interviews with millennials from around the world, in order to explore their habits concerning their mobile phones. On this article we will present you all the useful insights that we collected from our interviews with two Latin American students.
Our first interviewee, Bastian Diaz, is 22 years old and studies Journalism in Santiago, Chile. For Bastian, his mobile phone is an extension of his hand, as he admits that the first thing he does every morning is to turn off his alarm (which is on his phone) and then immediately check his Facebook notifications and his e-mail. He assumes that he spends no less than 15 minutes every morning in his bed scrolling down his screen and reading memes. Later in the day, he uses his phone to listen to music while walking. Even during university classes the phone is there to keep him company if he gets bored and memes is definitely a trend he enjoys on those moments. At night, before going to sleep, he spends 30–60 minutes chatting on WhatsApp with his friends. He considers himself a phone addict and in the past he tried to eliminate its use by uninstalling Facebook and Instagram from his phone, but his efforts failed.
He feels he would be very anxious if for some reason he didn’t have his phone with him, as he uses it not only to communicate with his friends and family, but also for his work as a tour guide and his studies. Especially for his studies he uses an app called U-Cursos, made by his university to inform students about the timetable, their notes and for several other announcements. For his work, he only needs to check his e-mail in order to receive all the information needed for his touristic tours in Santiago. As he spends a lot of time walking in his city he also uses a lot an app called Bus-Checker, which allows him to know when each bus arrives. He has never used Uber or similar apps (even though we see in installed on his phone), as he prefers public transportation. Also, even though Bastian is a typical example of a millennial that uses his phone all day long, he keeps a love for paper and he prefers having a traditional agenda- notebook than scheduling his day using mobile apps.
As far as sharing things via his mobile device, he mostly shares memes (yes, memes are a great love of his) on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Concerning these three social media, he says he uses Facebook to see and share memes and tag his friends, Instagram just to see what his friends have been up to (he doesn’t upload many photos himself) and WhatsApp only to chat. He also uses Messenger sometimes and he used to have Twitter some years ago, where he was an active user, but today he has no longer an account. On Twitter he had even made some friends, but now he wouldn’t use social media to meet people. For him, the digital world is only an expression of what happens in real life, thus he prefers using social platforms to communicate with his real life friends. The only digital community he’s a part of is an Instagram group he has with his school friends, that he only sees once or twice a year and they keep a contact almost exclusively by exchanging memes (usually football memes). It’s interesting to notice that even though Bastian uses Instagram on a daily basis, he doesn’t follow an influencers and when asked to express his thoughts on them, he says he doesn’t consider influencing a real profession, since “anybody can be an influencer”.
A question we often pose to ourselves these days is whether mobile phones and social media make us more connected or disconnected. Bastian believes that technology helps him stay connected with actuality, connected with the world. In the same time, though, he feels he loses much creative alone time. For example, he feels that his phone tends to win over his books and it makes him sad to think of.
Bastian believes he doesn’t really share the same phone habits as his friends because they have some different interests in general and this is reflected on the use of their mobile phones. For example, he has friends who shop online, but he doesn’t. Maybe they don’t share the same habits, but, according Bastian, they use their phones the same amount of time and they all prefer WhatsApp to other instant messaging apps, like Messenger or Telegram. This exact fact is the reason why WhatsApp is Bastian’s favorite messaging app: everyone he knows uses it, so if he wants to communicate with them he has to use it too.
He uses WhatsApp to contact his mother and his friends, his colleagues and his fellow students. On the other hand, as much as he likes communicating online, he finds those conversations quite simpler and more shallow than the real-life ones and he prefers using messaging apps to arrange dates and not to talk about his life on them. This is also true about the WhatsApp groups in which he takes part. Specifically, he has groups for his school friends, university friends, football team, closest friends, etc. For him, instant messaging apps and especially WhatsApp, are a great way to stay in touch and organise real-life meetings.
Let’s see now what our second interviewee, Maria Luisa Benjamin from Brazil, had to share with us. Maria Luisa is 20 years old and she studies Communication in Paris, France. Like Bastian, she uses her phone as soon as she wakes up and her screen time app has indicated that she uses her phone 6–7 hours per day. It was quite a shock for her to realise one day that she had used it for 15 whole hours! She certainly belongs to the generation that has always their phone with them, thus it’ s only natural that she says she would feel “vulnerable” if her mobile was taken away from her, but mostly annoyed because of the money a mobile phone costs. She believes that even so she could cope with it and it wouldn’t be such a disaster after all.
Concerning using the phone as an agenda to organise one’s day, she is on the same page as Bastian, since she describes herself as a “pen on paper kind of girl”. For her, a mobile phone is just practical and she doesn’t have a special love for it, neither does she favour it over other electronic devices. It’ s practical because, except from communicating with her family and friends through this, she can also use it occasionally for college, when she doesn’t have a computer with her or even for her work in order to talk to her boss. For work, she also uses an app called Student Pop. This is the app of an agency that finds jobs to students in France and through this they contact Maria Luisa every time there is a job opening for her.
Via her mobile phone, she enjoys sharing photos and stories with her friends, especially when travelling, but it’s not something she does all the time, like other people of her age. Due to her phone she feels more connected because she can keep in touch with her family and friends who leave far away from her, especially the ones in Brazil, since it’s been some years now that she lives in France. When she is with her friends though she doesn’t use her phone, so as to benefit from the real-life communication. As far as they are concerned, Maria Luisa thinks she uses her mobile phone less than her friends and although they use it in a quite similar way, there are some differences on their habits. For example, her friends shop online and follow many influencers, while she doesn’t. Specifically about influencers, she said, she used to spend too much time on Instagram and she decided to unfollow all influencers except from one, so as to save some time to herself. In her opinion “influencers sometimes can be quite shallow, but sometimes they could be useful and inspirational”.
Maria Luisa’s favorite messaging apps are WhatsApp and Messenger, that are according to her, very popular in Brazil. Like Bastian, she admits using these specific apps because of their popularity among her friends. These apps help her communicate with everyone and for any occasion and she sometimes she creates group chats. Between the two apps mentioned above, she prefers WhatsApp, because she finds it more practical. She uses these apps not only to talk to her friends, but also for academic reasons, in order to share notes with her classmates. On the screen of her phone above, we can notice that she uses many other social media like Facebook, SnapChat, Tumblr, Twitter and Tinder, but she didn’t mention them, thus we assume she is not such an active user of these apps.
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 Konstantina Nikolopoulou and elena kouki on the links below or visit our website https://mobileimapps.wixsite.com/website .
