Mobile phones are becoming a popular device to reach out to target population worldwide.

In this post, Mobiles for health – American Style, Corinne Ramey gives three examples of how mobile phones are used in America to  reach out for target population for health related information.

1. Case 1: In the state of Georgia, mobile phones are being used to monitor the health of diabetes patients. The study participants sent glucose readings and photos of the meals they ate. Professor Elizabeth Mynatt, director of GVU Center of the Georgia Institute of Technology said, “You can ask people what they have for breakfast, and it sounds healthy, but then you see the proportions on the plate, and not so much.”

2. Case 2: Internet Sexuality Information Services, Inc (ISIS), a California-based nonprofit focused on sexual health has been using text messaging campaigns such as SEXINFO and HOOKUP for providing sexual health-related information to people.

3. In Phoenix, Arizona, which is the ninth-most ozone polluted city in America, residents are using mobile phones to keep track of air quality. The Arizona Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ) sends out “high pollution” alerts to its 900 text message subscribers.

In Africa, Katrin Verclas writes in her post “Rapid Response, a m-health Platform” that a m-health platform on RapidSMS has been developed for the Millennium Villages Project with support from the UNICEF Innovation Group. The program is used by health care providers in the field to facilitate and coordinate activities through SMS text messages.

Agency faqs reported how RK Misra won the lead India contest by Times of India by using MyToday SMS service:

MyToday is a free SMS subscription service started by digital evangelist Rajesh Jain in India, which sends out daily message alerts on news, cricket, the sensex, jokes, religion, Bollywood and astrology to its three million subscribers.

Are there any other SMS based news service or cell phone news alerts services in India?

New communication technologies (mobile phones, the internet, third generation applications) are re-defining the way social interaction takes place among the young people. In this post, I review the study published by Virpi Oksman & Jussi Turtiainen from the University of Tampere in Finland.

In this study “Mobile communication as a social stage”, Oksman & Turtiainen (2004) look at the significance of mobile communication in the life of Finnish teenagers from the theoretical standpoint of “symbolic interactionism.”

The ”symbolic interactionism” framework states that, “interactions are symbolic and based on signs and meanings, and social interactions produce shared meanings.” It also presumes that face – to – face interaction is the most fundamental form of social interaction. They write that, according to Goffman’s social stage theory, presentation of self  (an acceptable persone) and a “frame” that defines the signs and forms of interaction are an important aspects of social interaction. Goffman differentiates between “embodied” (when the body is present) and “disembodied” (when the body is distant) information. In the much of the mobile communication, social interaction takes place through disembodied participants. Hence, it can be assumed that mobile communication are re-defining social interaction. Therefore, the main research questions guiding this study is “whether new media technologies (mobile communications) generate new forms of social interaction?”

The data for this study was collected through an ongoing research project at University of Tampere, that focused on communication culture of under-18s in Finland. There were 168 inidividual and group thematic interviews of teenagers conducted between spring 2000 and winter 2002. The duration of the interviews varied from one to three hours. 99 percent of the participants owned a mobile phone and belonged to socioeconomically heterogeneous background. The thematic interviews were conducted in places where young people normally hang out such as cafes and fast food restaurants.

They use the “media ethnographic” approach to understand the mobile communication of young people. According to them, young people’s mobile communication and cultural practices should be understood as connected with their every day life, sociocultural environment and other media use.

In their study, they found that:

1. Mobile phone is an important part of everyday life for Finnish teenagers, used to maintain social networks and form new relationships. It is also used to define their personal space, that is, it enables private communication outside of parental supervision.

2. Mobile communication has changed the relationship between teens and their parents. In general, teens have more freedom to conduct their own affairs.

3. Mobile communication allows teens to maintain their evolving social networks and forge new friendships. It particularly enables romantic relationships through text messaging.

4. Mobile communication has also led to new forms of mediated communication practices such as text messaging, bomb calls.

5. Mobiles are also used by teenagers to pass time by sending text messages and playing games.

6. When compared with other new forms of communication technologies and applications, mobile phones were considered as more necessary aspect of their everyday life and communication.

7. Although there were no differences in the ownership of mobile phones between girls and boys they detected gender differences in their use of  and attitudes towards technology. For example, girls sent longer messages and were more interested in the interactive and aesthetic aspects of technology. Whereas boys sent shorter messages, and were more interested in the developments in new technologies.

Mobile phones are magical. They have touched almost every other life on this planet.

Last week I was talking to my mom in India. Every morning, my mom goes out to listen to spiritual discourses. Since her surgery, she can’t go out. Therefore, she is using her mobile phone to listen to them every morning from home. I was amazed to hear that. It’s almost her private live mobile-cast of the spiritual discourses. She calls up this girl on her reliance mobile phone, who keeps her mobile phone in front of the speaker. And she can listen to the spiritual discourses every morning for free. The mobile service she uses, allows her to talk for free across India.

And I was wondering, why her mobile phone was engaged every night my time (every morning her time) for so long

Cell phones are extremely popular among young people across the world. Cross-cultural research has revealed interesting similarities and differences regarding cell phone usage by young people from different countries. In this post, I report on a study on cell phone usage by college students in USA.

Aoki & Downes (2003) investigated cell phone usage among American college students from a behavioral and psychological perspective. Their objectives were to (a) find out why college students acquired a cell phone and (b) to determine the relationship between cell phone usage behavior and intrinsic motivations about usage.

They used mixed - methods – both qualitative (focus groups) and quantitative (surveys) to collect data. They conducted four focus groups (32 students) and administered a survey to 137 students.

Their results from focus groups indicated that there were nine motivational themes for which college students acquired a cell phone. These were – personal safety, financial incentive, information access, social interaction, parental contacts, time management/coordination, dependency, image and privacy management.

With regard to the behavioral characteristics – most respondents obtained a cell phone when they entered college; the majority made five or fewer calls per day; majority of calls were made from “on the street” followed by “at home” and “at school”; most often the cell phones were used to call “friends and relatives”, “boyfriends or girlfriends”, and “immediate family members”; majority made calls from their cell phones at night and more than half the respondents said that their parents were paying their phone bills.

By performing a Q factor analysis, they identified five groups of cell phone users -

1. Group 1 – “Cost conscious” – This was the largest group and believed that cell phone is the cheaper way to make calls. They spend a lot of time receiving calls and talking on cell phones but did not make most of the calls.

2. Group 2 – “Security/Safety conscious” – This group felt that having a cell phone makes them feel safer. They used cell phones very minimally.

3. Group 3 – “Dependent” – The students in this group felt lost without their cell phones and they used the cell phones frequently.

4. Group 4 – “Sophisticated” – For this group, owning a cell phone equaled to having a style statement. They were the early adopters among the group and also tend to make the most number of calls.

5. Group 5 – “Practical users” – This group used the cell phone because it made sense. They did not care about the style or believed it was a necessity. They used the cell phones moderately when they needed to use it.

This study showed that even within a homogeneous group such as college students there could be distinct groups of users. It would be interesting to see if these groups would have similar characteristics in other cultures as well.

SMS is taking over our lives. It provides instant communication. Yet, when I read this article, on how young people are using SMS lingo in exam papers, I found it hilarious as well as shocking. On one hand, there is non-english speaking Indian population, that is learning English through mobile phone usage. On other hand, there are english-medium educated students who are using SMS language in exam papers.

I am sure the trend is not only limited to India, but is also there in other countries.

SMS (Short messaging services) are not only changing the way people communicate, but are also impacting the literary world. In India, you can buy a variety of books on SMS:

Not only are these books a collection of SMS but are categorically divided as well. Take for instance. Shayari SMS, Romantic SMS, Lovely SMS, Hot SMS, Santa Banta SMS, Latest collection of 2006 SMS, Spicy SMS, SMS for all occasions, Hilarious SMS are just a few to mention.

Not only this, people reading Hindi are not neglected as these books are available in Hindi as well like Chulbule SMS and Hindi SMS.

So now you don’t have to rack your brains and rely on your penmanship if you want to send a heartfelt message, just like everything else, you can buy them readymade…..

Although this article is now a year old, I find it extremely fascinating that mobile phone users in rural India are learning English language through mobile phones.

Hari Bhandari Bahadur (55), a guard in the St Xavier’s College, never got a chance to go to school. But after procuring a mobile phone in 2005, he has learnt to identify all English alphabets within a short time.

Now he identifies the ‘missed call’ given by his wife, as the mobile screen reflects ‘BB’. “I saved her number as capital letters ‘B’ written twice meaning ‘biwi’ (wife) so I understand that my wife is calling,” said Bahadur innocently.

Another such person is vegetable vendor Mohammad Shamim, who in between selling vegetables, has picked up words like “menu, call, reject, receive, silent, vibrate” in the past seven years of cellphone usage.

It would be interesting to know, if this trend is prevalent through out India or just limited to northern India. Also if it is happening across the world. Secondly, whether people who are learning English through mobile phone usage are using it in their daily life or limiting it to their interactions on mobile phone.

Today, while I was reading about emotional attachment to cell phones in a chapter written by Jane Vincent in the book Thumb Culture, I was reminded of an interesting incident I witnessed last year in my apartment. I was living with new apartment mates who had just come from India. One night, when I went to their room to ask for something, I was amazed to see one of the girls sleeping with her head on the keyboard section of her laptop. It was both hilarious and touching. I gently tried to remove her laptop, but she woke up startled and wanted her laptop to remain open through the night. I couldn’t have asked her about what was going on in her mind, but I could sense how deeply connected she felt to everyone back home, through her laptop.

In her chapter, Vincent examined the various ways in which social practices of mobile phone users and their relationship to mobile phones leads to emotional attachment to cell phones. She found that people were emotional about the information stored in and delivered via their mobile phones. I quite agree with this statement, the fact that people exchange emotionally charged text messages with their loved ones, and then store them for reading later, could make them emotional about their mobile phones.

Further, she also found that people are more emotionally attached to person-to-person communication than person-to-WWW connection. I think it would be interesting to examine young people’s emotional involvement to text messages sent to reality TV programs such as the “American Idol” or “Indian Idol”. It is my assumption that the level of emotional attachment, to the information exchanged between people, with internet and with TV, would be very different and of a different nature.

She also identified several emotional responses associated with the use of mobile phones – panic, strangeness, ‘being cool’, irrational behavior, thrill, anxiety. I think this would be definitely true in the case of young people who feel “very cool” to own a certain mobile device and be a part of mobile culture associated with it.

Her findings that people look at mobile phones as an icon of “me, my mobile and my identity” show that people share an emotionally charged relationship with mobile phones. What I found most interesting was her explanation that the use of mobile phone involves the engagement with more senses than any other computational device and therefore, leads to greater emotional attachment. For example, when you use mobile phones, you get sensory experiences such as touch (by carrying, holding or fondling the cell phone), hearing (because of listening to others), sight (by looking at messages sent and received), and smell and taste (you get by association only).

And this statement brings me back to the incident I described earlier, I think the laptop exuded the warmth, for my roommate, which she had left behind…and despite the pinging from her friends back home through the night, she had a restful sleep. That’s what she told me in the morning, when I jokingly reminded her of sleeping with her laptop…

In this article, Gladarev & Lonkila (2008) use network data method and qualitative interviews to examine the role of personal networks on adoption and cell phone usage among young adults in Russia in the age group of 19 – 30 years. They report that:

1. Personal networks play an important role in the purchase of cell phone, choice of cell phone operator and communication through cell phones.

2. The cell phones have not replaced face-to-face meetings but help in preparing for future meetings, coordinating mutual interactions, and in relationship maintenance.

3. Cell phones may have an impact on (extended) family configurations by segregating social ties, developing new niches of intimacy and increasing the significance of marital tie.

4. The increasing coordination by cell phones may result in tightening social control.

Their study provides support for ‘social shaping of technology’ perspective suggesting that social networks not only impact the adoption and use of cell phones but also are moulded by its use.