Researchers have found that mobile media technologies such as smartphones aren't taking people away from relying on traditional media sources such as newspapers or television. Instead, mobile media are filling the spaces in people's daily routine in which other media sources are either unavailable or inconvenient to use.
That suggests mobile media use is taking a different path to popularity than did technologies like television, said John Dimmick, lead author of the study and professor of communication at Ohio State University.
"Typically, what happens with new media is that they compete with and displace older media to a certain extent, like television did with radio," Dimmick said. "But at least early in its development, mobile media isn't taking us away from older media – it has its own separate niche."
Dimmick conducted the study with Gregory Hoplamazian, a graduate student at Ohio State, and John Christian Feaster of Rowan University in New Jersey. The results appear in the current issue of the journal New Media & Society.
This study involved 166 participants who agreed to keep a time-space diary of their media use over the course of a day. The participants recorded a total of 1,843 media sessions – a period of time when they used a single medium to access news, sports or weather content.
Overall, mobile media was still a relatively minor player in the way people accessed news – it accounted for only about 7 percent of all media sessions.
Computers were the most popular method for accessing news, with about 24 percent of all media sessions occurring on desktops and 15 percent occurring on laptops. Television accounted for about 29 percent of all media sessions. Newspapers and radio each accounted for about 9 percent of sessions, cellular-news reported.
