The Digital Edge. S. Craig Watkins
in serious flux. After losing practically everything in a devastating fire, Kyle, along with his mother and younger sibling, had recently moved in with relatives. Like the majority of students at Freeway, Kyle had no intentions of going to college. Each Friday his father picked him up after school and the two repaired air conditioners together, the trade Kyle decided to pursue after high school.
Cassandra was present and in her typical pleasant mood. But beneath her amiable exterior was grave concern about the changes that were remaking life at home. Her mother and father had recently lost their jobs, creating a great deal of financial strain on the family. Antonio, Jasmine, and Jada also participated in the group discussion. During part of the school year, Jasmine lived with her grandparents, a loving couple who worked hard to steady her life as she navigated the ups and downs of high school. Jada showed up despite a busy schedule. In addition to working practically every day after school, she also held a spot on the school’s dance squad and was a member of the business council. Her parents and siblings had their own phones and computers, making them one of the most tech rich families in our study.
We opened with an icebreaker, a get-to-know-you session that was loosely structured rather than rigidly scripted. To get things started we distributed construction paper, colored pencils, crayons, markers, and provided these simple instructions.
“What we want you to do is draw whatever technology you use the most, right now.” Someone blurted out, “Does it have to be electrical?”
“No, your favorite, or what you use the most, right now,” a member of our team replied.
Amid the thinking, daydreaming, and drawing one student jokingly suggested a Betamax, which provoked a friendly response from another student, “You took my idea.”
As the pictures began to come into form, a clear pattern emerged: most students elected to draw a mobile device.
Jada drew her phone. “I chose my phone because I listen to all my music on there, I get on the Internet, download apps, do everything with my phone.” She had owned several phones throughout her teen years, but she described her current phone, an Android, as “the highest technology I’ve owned.” When asked to describe her phone in three words, she chose “awesome,” “crap,” and “all right.” “Because sometime it freezes up on me and I have to turn it off, take out the battery.”
“The Android sucks,” someone chimed in. Adding, “Even though I have an Android, I think the Android sucks. They have so many problems.”
Antonio concurred, “I like it [Android] better than the iPhone, because iPhones cost too much.” Cassandra agreed, “That is true.” Kyle, in a self-deprecating tone, noted that he was in the stone age, a reference to his small, outdated flip phone. Kyle’s device lacked all of the features common in phones today: no camera, no apps, and no ability to email, browse the web, play games, or listen to music.
After noticing Kyle’s picture, one interviewer asked, “Did you draw a pager?”
“No. I did my Playstation 2, and an iPod, and my skateboard, because I enjoy listening to music while I skate, and while I play video games, and I pretty much play video games all the time, because that’s all I have to do, other than skate.” Kyle chose the words “fun,” “time-consuming,” and “adventurous” to describe his favorite technologies.
Jada drew her phone. “Why is it important to you?” one of our interviewers asked.
“Kind of like the main thing that I use, like, when I come home from work, and stuff, like, sometimes I’m curious, so I get on my phone and like, look, whatever up, you know.” She added, “And I talk on the phone forever and I listen to music, mainly so … I do practically everything on it.” Jada chose the words “beneficial,” “convenient,” and “interesting” to describe her phone.
Amina drew her iPod Touch, “because it’s the only thing I use, pretty much.” She uses the iPod to text, go on Facebook, listen to music, and take pictures. Her phone was broke, which forced her to rely heavily on the iPod for social connections and media consumption. Referring to the broken phone she said, “I have to get a new one, but I probably won’t.” At the time of our focus group she did not have enough money to purchase a new phone. Amina described her iPod as “useful, entertaining, and pretty.” Her last adjective, “pretty,” reflects the degree to which the social identities of teens are heavily wrapped in the mobile devices they own—that is, mobile phones as a source of status, personal expression, and identity construction.1
Sergio produced a picture of his computer because he uses it for everything. “Like, mainly music, because I have some music software on there and I can record my guitar, … or I can make different beats, kind of like GarageBand, but better.” His aunt purchased the digital music production software for him. The computer, according to Sergio, had been in the family a long time. “My sister got it from her boyfriend.” He described the computer as slow. “It’s the family computer, so, all these files are bringing it down,” he explained. Sergio selected the words “slow,” “crap,” and “green” (the color of the computer) to describe the laptop.
Cassandra sketched a meticulous picture of her phone.
“Because I use it a lot … all the time. It’s my only, like, electronic device that’s mine,” adding, “I use it for texting, calling, my calendar, my notepad, music.” She claimed that this must have been her thirteenth phone. “Sometimes they break, and sometimes I break them.”
“How would you describe your phone?” an interviewer asked.
“Handy, and slow, and … let me think … what’s a word to describe a good phone that lasts a long time?” she asked. “Dependable,” she uttered.
Antonio told the group that his iPod was his favorite device. “I listen to music while playing video games,” Antonio said. “I don’t play on a computer, because I don’t really use it at home, because it’s just always being used and I never really get a chance.” He explained that the touch screen function was broken on his iPod, “so I can’t lock it, or listen to music with it, so I just chose my top five hundred songs of mine and I put them on this [an older iPod Nano]. And now I just listen to those.” The three words Antonio chose to describe his iPod were “creative, life, and relaxing.”
The pictures that students drew and the stories that accompanied them were a revealing window into the world that we had entered. We strongly suspected that the use of mobile technologies by students, while active, was likely to be structured by complex social, financial, and familial circumstances. The focus group provided some early clues that this hypothesis was not only viable but quite likely in the world that students made at Freeway. While it was clear that the students in our sample used a variety of mobile technologies, it was also clear that the contexts and circumstances—familial flux, economic constraints, and rundown devices—in which they adopted mobile technologies greatly influenced their practices.
Over the course of the year we discovered that mobile media matter in the lives of young people at Freeway in ways that are both obvious and not so obvious. For instance, it was not surprising to learn that mobile devices were the principal gateway to connecting with peers through texting, Facebook, and Twitter. Popular apps like Instagram and Snapchat emerged during the fieldwork and analysis phase of our research. Both Instagram and Snapchat were predicated on the stories that surfaced in the icebreaker exercise described above: teens’ interactions with peers and pop culture occur primarily through smartphones. But we also learned that among some students mobile is a crucial node in the informal learning ecologies that they designed and the creative practices that they pursued. In addition to being a lifeline to friends, mobile was a lifeline to learning and creating media.
Teens and Mobile Phone Adoption
One of the major social and technological shifts since the mid-2000s has been the growing number of young children and teens who own their own mobile devices including iPods, tablets, and, of course, smartphones.2 To gain a fuller view of the central role of mobile in the lives of children and teens, consider the teen mobile adoption studies conducted by the Pew Internet & American