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The Mobile Paradox
Understanding the Mobile Lives of Latino and Black Youth
S. Craig Watkins
Our very first round of interviews with Freeway students occurred one afternoon shortly after they had been released from school. It was a focus group with about seven students from various backgrounds. Amina was a senior whose family had arrived in Austin via New York and before that via Ethiopia. She was bright and articulate, and had a serious side that reflected the serious circumstances that characterized her turbulent home life. Sergio joined us too. Early in our fieldwork we learned that he was generally ambivalent about school but incredibly engaged, active, and driven in the after-school world Freeway offered.
Selena also attended the session. Throughout the school year Selena swayed back and forth, unsure whether she should continue at Freeway and graduate. Many of her friends had dropped out of school, and she had skipped so many classes that she spent as much time in credit recovery as she did in her regular classes. Kyle, always full of energy, joined us. He enjoyed rapping, skateboarding, and playing video games even though his personal and familial life was 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 Life project.
In 2004, according to Pew, 45 percent of twelve- to seventeen-year-olds owned a mobile phone.3 By 2015 roughly three in four teens, or 73 percent, owned a smartphone.4 The mobile phone, in a relatively short period of time, emerged as the central hub of teen life, serving variously as the center for peer interaction and communication, identity work, and media consumption.5 Moreover, the racial, ethnic, and class dimensions associated with mobile adoption are noteworthy. While young people in general have migrated to mobile devices, black and Latino youths’ engagement is especially active compared with that of their white counterparts.
As our fieldwork unfolded, the mobile landscape was shifting. For example, Pew explained that even though teens from higher-income households were slightly more likely to own a mobile phone, “parent income levels do not map as neatly with smartphone ownership among teens.”6 Teens living in the lowest-earning households (under $30,000 per year) were about as likely as teens living in the highest-earning households ($75,000 or more) to own smartphones (39 percent vs. 43 percent).7 Smartphone ownership among Latino and black teens was higher than that of their white counterparts. Whereas 43 percent and 40 percent, respectively, of Latino and black teens owned a smartphone, only 35 percent of white teens did.8 The adoption of mobile devices among Latino and African Americans transformed their engagement with the digital world and rewrote the digital divide narrative.
Teens have been a prominent and persistent thread in the study of mobile phones.9 The implications of mobile platforms for learning, living, connectivity, and opportunity are striking. In this chapter we focus on five themes that emerged from our initial deep dive into the data that we collected related to the mobile lives and practices of Freeway students. The first two themes map some of the broader trends that shape the mobile lives of black and Latino teens. The final three themes offer specific accounts of the mobile practices that we observed during our fieldwork.
First, we consider the mobile paradox, a reference to the ironies associated with black and Latino youth adoption of mobile technologies.10 The mobile media ecologies and practices that we discovered embody the hallmark features of both early adoption and late adoption, a fact that animates the degree to which the use of mobile devices in resource-constrained communities is contradictory and complex. The next section considers the influence of mobile technologies in the rising rates of teen media consumption, most notably among African American and Latino youth. The chapter then addresses the role of mobile in the classroom. Even though the school district adopted strict policies against the use of personal mobile devices in the classroom, the everyday reality at Freeway was that students remained tethered to their handhelds even when they were in class.
In the next section we explore the mobile “learning and creative” ecologies that students established. Even though the school district banned mobile as part of the learning environment, a few students in our study adopted mobile as a key node in their informal learning and creative pursuits. Finally, precarious familial and economic circumstances render access to mobile technologies tenuous for many youth in lower-income households. Financial barriers to handheld devices aside, we discovered a set of creative and improvisational practices that some Freeway students employed to gain access to the devices, media content, and peer connections that make mobile the central artery of teen social life. We refer to this as the making of an informal sharing economy.
The Mobile Paradox
The relationship between social inequality and media adoption is increasingly complex. Lower-income and lower-education households remain somewhat less likely than their higher-income and higher-education counterparts to use the Internet, though that particular gap closed considerably throughout the first decade of the new millennium. However, when you factor in mobile, use of the Internet across categories like household income and education changes as those who are in the lower socioeconomic group are just as likely as, and in some cases more likely than, higher socioeconomic groups to use a mobile phone as the primary gateway to the Internet. We witnessed this trend consistently throughout our fieldwork, which was confirmed by data from the Pew Research Center.
More specifically, Pew measured what it called Internet access “mostly on cell phones.” African American teens (33 percent) were more likely than white (24 percent) or Latino teens (21 percent) to report that they access the Internet mostly on a cell phone.11 Teens from lower-income households (30 percent) were also more likely than teens from higher-income households (24 percent) to report Internet access mostly on a cell phone.12 The key takeaway here is not that teens from higher-income households were not going online from a mobile phone, but rather that they benefit from a wider set of options when they go online from home, especially in the form of high-capacity network connections.
Americans’ use of the Internet via a mobile device began rising sharply after 2007. Roughly one-fifth (24 percent) of Americans used the Internet on a mobile device in 2007.13 By 2009, nearly a third (33 percent) had done so. Between the end of 2007 and the beginning of 2009, handheld Internet use for the general population on an average day grew by 73 percent.14 Among African Americans, use of the mobile Internet during this same period was even more pronounced. Handheld Internet use for African Americans grew at twice the rate of the general population, or 141 percent.15 By 2009 almost half (48 percent) of blacks had used a mobile device at one time to access the Internet.
Higher usage of the mobile Internet notwithstanding, black and Latino teens continue to face significant challenges regarding their engagement with Internet-based media. During our fieldwork, white teens (81 percent) and Latino teens (79 percent) were much more likely than black teens (64 percent) to own a laptop or desktop computer.16 In our cases the teens that did have home access to a computer typically shared it with other family members. And while studies dating back to the middle and late 1990s have suggested that the presence of a computer in the house corresponds with the presence of a child in that house, sharing a computer can often limit the amount of time young people spend on a home computer, the range of activities they engage in, and, consequently, the kinds of networks, skills, and knowledge that they develop.
Moreover, several students in our cases reported that the computers in their homes often lacked the upgrades, software, or functional capacity to pursue the kinds of online experiences that were of interest to them. Needless to say, a computer that cannot connect to the Internet, stream music or videos, offer game play, or communicate with peers via social media is of little use to most teens. Circumstances like these—sharing a household computer or limited computer functionality—contribute greatly to the increasing use of mobile phones and the mobile Internet in lower-income households.
Meanwhile, as the use of mobile was rising for blacks and Latinos, their access to home broadband Internet lagged behind that of white and Asian households. The uneven distribution of home broadband Internet service is especially noteworthy. In the United States, home broadband Internet adoption continues to be strongly associated with a mix of indicators including income, education, race and ethnicity, geography, and whether a child is in the home.17 Historically, households with broadband Internet tend to be white or Asian, higher income, and higher educated.
The devices that we use to access the Internet are just as important as whether we access the Internet. During the period of our fieldwork, African Americans were less likely than whites to access the Internet on a desktop or laptop computer, but they were 70 percent more likely than whites to access the Internet on a handheld device.18 The data from this period strongly suggest that two different pathways to the Internet were emerging for black and white Americans. The Pew Research Center adds that “to an extent notably greater than that for whites, wireless access for African Americans serves as a substitute for a missing onramp to the Internet—the home broadband connection.”19 Pew also concluded that English-speaking Latinos were the heaviest users of wireless on-ramps to the Internet.20 What are the social implications of these trends?
Not surprisingly, analysts have viewed the adoption of the mobile web by African Americans and Latinos in two competing ways: as a sign of progress or as a sign of continuing deficits. However, the story is a bit more complex. It turns out that what was really happening was the emergence of adaptive, even innovative behaviors—namely early adoption of the mobile Internet. As early as the mid-2000s, futurists were predicting that mobile was the future of the connected and computing worlds. When Steve Jobs introduced the iPad in 2009 to an eager Apple audience, he repeatedly noted that “it was like holding the Internet in your hands.” It turns out that in the United States, a population of unlikely early adopters, blacks and Latinos, were already holding the Internet in their hands. The key question, of course, is, what kind of Internet were they holding? Going online via a mobile platform emerged as the norm among populations that historically have not been associated with the class of early technology adopters.
These different pathways to the online world also structure different opportunities to participate in the online world. Predictably, homes with access to broadband Internet accrue several advantages compared with homes without broadband. Households with broadband, for instance, are much more likely than those without to use the Internet for a wider array of activities—social, educational, political, and recreational. Youth with home access to broadband have more opportunities than youth without to build rich interest-driven learning ecologies that promote digital exploration, experimentation, and content creation. It is not that youth without home broadband access are unable to build interest-driven learning ecologies, but rather that they must be especially resourceful to do so. Throughout this book we explore how Freeway students designed a number of creative and flexible solutions to ensure greater access to and participation in digital media culture.
The mobile lives of black and Latino youth raise a number of interesting questions regarding the ever-shifting currents of the digital divide and represent, more generally, what we call a mobile paradox. On the one hand, the adoption of mobile phones and the mobile Internet among African Americans and Latinos suggests that they are early adopters and mobile trendsetters in the United States. On the other hand, the conditions that shape black and Latino teens’ mobile practices suggest that they continue to grapple with the social and economic challenges associated with life in the digital edge.
Even as black and Latino youth are early adopters of mobile, they are less likely than white or Asian youth to grow up in households with access to broadband Internet and the associated benefits. Home broadband expands the opportunities for young people to develop the social networks and technical competence that are associated with more robust forms of digital media practice, production, and participatory cultures. Put another way, the opportunities to cultivate more dynamic forms of digital literacy and social capital are severely limited when young people must rely on broadband Internet access through school, a public library, or someone else’s house.21
The mobile path to the online world for Latino and black youth also raises some concerns. Smartphones can be a tool for youth creativity, learning, and civic engagement (i.e., Black Lives Matter, The March for Our Lives). However, there are credible concerns that teens who are restricted to mobile phones for home Internet use may also be restricted to social worlds, media literacies, and cultural practices that rarely, if ever, afford access to the social and technical currencies that power whole new kinds of learning pathways and opportunities in the networked world. From a more technical perspective, mobile Internet connections lag in comparison with the high-capacity Internet connections associated with broadband or fiber optic cables in terms of data, speed, and network capacity.22 This explains, for example, what is call the “homework gap,” or the recognition that students who only have mobile phone access to the Internet at home are severely limited in their ability to execute school assignments. In short, homes with mobile-only Internet are at a social, technical, and educational disadvantaged compared with their broadband counterparts.
Historically, early adoption of consumer technologies has been viewed as an indicator of a privileged status. However, the early adoption of the mobile Internet by blacks and Latinos tells a more complex story. More specifically, their early adoption of the mobile Internet reflects the degree to which social and economic inequalities persist even when they appear to have diminished.
Anytime/Anywhere: The Transformation of Teen Media Consumption
Predictably, the increase in mobile media ownership contributes to the increasing amount of media young people consume in a typical day. In its 1999 study, The Kaiser Family Foundation reports that American youth spent about seven hours a day consuming media.23 By 2015, a Common Sense study that included similar methods to and one of the authors from the Kaiser report found that teens averaged about nine hours a day of media use.24 A decade after its first study of young people’s media use Kaiser summed up its key takeaway this way: “The story of media in young people’s lives today is primarily a story of technology facilitating increased consumption.”25 Several studies also report significant racial and ethnic differences in young people’s media consumption. The Common Sense study finds that African American youth spend about eleven hours a day with media compared to nine and eight hours, respectively, among their Latino and white counterparts.26
A 2010 Kaiser study found that Latino and black youth were significantly more active on their mobile devices than white youth, suggesting that mobile adoption in the digital edge has been in the making for some time.27 For instance, Latino and black youth spent more time texting and talking with their mobile phones than their white counterparts.28 The racial gap in mobile media consumption was even wider. Compared with white children and teens, black and Latino youth were heavy consumers of media content via mobile devices. Both black and Latino youth spend more time than white youth using mobile to consume music, games, and video.29 Mobile is the ultimate media consumption platform and easily provides teens with what Nielsen Media Research calls “entertainment Nirvana.”30 The consumption of entertainment media was a major impetus in the coveting of mobile devices among many of the students in our study.
The twin brothers Miguel and Marcus wanted mobile devices to access Facebook and play games. Selena wanted mobile so that she could listen to her favorite bands and post pictures on social media. Sergio believed that a mobile device would keep him connected to his favorite bands. The role of mobile as a platform for media consumption was clearly evident from the initial focus group that we conducted with students. Many of them echoed a similar sentiment: “I use my mobile for everything.” Translation: “I consume much of my media entertainment via my mobile device.” For many young people, their participation in pop culture is increasingly facilitated by their adoption and use of mobile content including, among other things, music, video games, apps, video, memes, social media, and photos. But the significance of mobile in the lives of teens extends well beyond the media that they consume.
Mobile, for example, is a source for peer community and social identity. In their adoption of mobile, teens align themselves with certain peer groups, tastes, cultures, and what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu refers to as “distinctions” in their acquisition of peer-inflected forms of cultural capital.31 Among young people, mobile technologies are clear markers of social status.32 Students at Freeway noticed when their peers acquired a new mobile device. When Diego received an iPhone as a gift from his mother, his standing in his peer group immediately rose. Students without handheld devices, like Miguel and Marcus, experienced varying degrees of frustration and social isolation from their peers. Whereas technology is often decried for making young people less social, a new reality has emerged: not owning a connected device may actually lead to greater social isolation from peers.
Several factors—social, structural, and financial—provide greater perspective on the rising rates of mobile media consumption among black and Latino teens. Over the course of our fieldwork we noticed that many of the students at Freeway lacked access to enrichment opportunities outside of what the school provided. As we discuss in chapter six, many families at Freeway did not have the resources—money or the time—to invest in costly or time-consuming after-school learning and enrichment activities for their children. This partially explains the higher amounts of leisure time among youth in lower-income households and lower amounts among youth in higher-income households.33 Consequently, youth from lower-income households find themselves with substantial amounts of free or unstructured time on their hands. Equipped with a rising number of screens, including handhelds, some children and teens may be filling some of that free time consuming mobile games, videos, music, and social media.
A conversation between one of our researchers and Gabriella, a young sophomore student in our sample, highlights how unstructured time, boredom, and access to a mobile screen can lead to increased media consumption. Discussing her use of social media, Gabriella says, “I would say that I am addicted to Twitter during the summer because I have nothing to do so I keep checking it every five minutes. Even when I log out and go to eat or something and then five minutes later I need to go back.” She also explained that she is trying to “break myself from Twitter,” a platform she called entertaining.
“Why do you want to break from Twitter?” a member of our research team asked.
“Because it’s annoying after a while. It stops me from doing other things,” Gabriella responded.
We are not convinced that Gabriella’s constant engagement with Twitter is attributable to a social-psychological disorder—Internet addiction. Rather, the likely unstructured leisure time induces her to use mobile media to occupy time and ease the annoyance of boredom.
The racial, ethnic, and class trends in media consumption noted above are not new. Historically, social and economic factors have influenced differences in youth media consumption. High levels of entertainment media consumption tend to correspond with lower economic status.34 Although mobile devices did not create the media consumption gaps reported above, the rising rates of mobile media ownership in black and Latino households might certainly be accelerating these trends.
The broad diffusion of handheld devices among young children and teens is certainly changing their media consumption behaviors, and the implications—health, educational, social—for youth in disadvantaged households are worth noting. Compared with older forms of screen-based media, such as television, video, console-based games, and computers, mobile devices introduce new dimensions to teen media consumption. First, mobile privatizes young people’s media consumption more than ever before, making it increasingly difficult for parents, teachers, and other adults to monitor. Second, and perhaps more important, is the ability to consume media on the go and across different settings. For a number of youth in our study, the consumption of media takes place early in the morning and late in the evening, in school and out of school—in other words, anytime and anywhere.35
However, the focus on screen time obscures other substantive issues. Rather than ask, how much media do young people consume?, the more relevant question is, what kinds of media are young people consuming? The latter question shifts the focus to quality, not quantity, and considers the different repertoires of media use. In today’s environment, media can be a diverse experience, one marked by production rather than consumption, participation rather than isolation, and skill building rather than time wasting. Even as studies document the rising rates of media consumption and screen time, it is important to acknowledge that not all screen time is equal.
The data and adoption trends discussed above confirm that mobile figures prominently in the lives of many black and Latino youth. Still, we know very little about how mobile media matter in their everyday lives. In the end, the more substantive issues related to mobile are less about devices and more about practices. That is, what are Latino and black youth doing with the mobile devices that they are adopting, and how, if at all, are mobile technologies transforming life, learning, and opportunity in the digital edge? The next three sections offer more texture and context to our mapping and understanding of the mobile lives of the students that we met at Freeway.
Mobile + Learning: The In-School Perils and Possibilities
Throughout the interviews, students consistently mentioned the use of mobile devices in the classroom despite the fact that school district policy prohibited such use. In most cases students described the use of mobile technologies for texting with friends, playing games, listening to music, or browsing social media like Instagram. In some cases, students received permission to listen to music as they completed homework assignments in the classroom.
