Nothing Special   »   [go: up one dir, main page]

skip to main content
research-article
Public Access

What Makes Smartphone Use Meaningful or Meaningless?

Published: 26 March 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Prior research indicates that many people wish to limit aspects of their smartphone use. Why is it that certain smartphone use feels so meaningless? We examined this question by using interviews, the experience sampling method, and mobile logging of 86,402 sessions of app use. One motivation for use (habitual use to pass the time) and two types of use (entertainment and passive social media) were associated with a lower sense of meaningfulness. In interviews, participants reported feeling a loss of autonomy when using their phone in these ways. These reports were corroborated by experience sampling data showing that motivation to achieve a specific purpose declined over the course of app use, particularly for passive social media and entertainment usage. In interviews, participants pointed out that even when smartphone use itself was meaningless, it could sometimes still be meaningful in the context of broader life as a 'micro escape' from negative situations. We discuss implications for how mobile apps can be used and designed to reduce meaningless experiences.

Supplemental Material

ZIP File - lukoff
Supplemental movie, appendix, image and software files for, What Makes Smartphone Use Meaningful or Meaningless?

References

[1]
Adam Alter. 2017. Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked. Penguin.
[2]
Sam Altaian. 2014. Value is created by doing. Retrieved from https://blog.samaltman.com/value-is-created-by-doing
[3]
Nikola Banovic, Christina Brant, Jennifer Mankoff, and Anind K Dey. 2014. ProactiveTasks: the Short of Mobile Device Use Sessions. Proceedings of the 16th international conference on Human-computer interaction with mobile devices 8 services - MobileHCI '14: 243--252.
[4]
Roy F. Baumeister, Kathleen D. Vohs, Jennifer L. Aaker, and Emily N. Garbinsky. 2013. Some key differences between a happy life and a meaningful life. Journal of Positive Psychology 8, 6: 505--516.
[5]
Eric P.S. Baumer, Phil Adams, Vera D. Khovanskaya, Tony C. Liao, Madeline E. Smith, Victoria Schwanda Sosik, and Kaiton Williams. 2013. Limiting leaving, and (re)lapsing. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '13, 3257.
[6]
Joseph B Bayer, Nicole B Ellison, Sarita Y Schoenebeck, and Emily B Falk. 2016. Sharing the small moments: ephemeral social interaction on Snapchat. Inf. Commun. Soc. 19, 7: 956--977.
[7]
JT Behrens. 1997. Principles and procedures of exploratory data analysis. Psychological Methods 2:131.
[8]
Katherine Bessiere, Sara Kiesler, Robert Kraut, and Bonka S Boneva. 2008. Effects of Internet use and social resources on changes in depression. Information, Community 8 Society 11, 1: 47--70.
[9]
Matthias Böhmer, Brent Hecht, Johannes Schöning, Antonio Krüger, and Gernot Bauer. 2011. Falling Asleep with Angry Birds, Facebook and Kindle: A Large Scale Study on Mobile Application Usage. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI '11), 47--56.
[10]
Bianca Bosker. 2016. The Binge Breaker. The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/11/the-binge-breaker/501122/
[11]
Rafael A Calvo, Karthik Dinakar, Rosalind Picard, and Pattie Maes. 2016. Computing in mental health. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 3438--3445.
[12]
Rafael A Calvo and Dorian Peters. 2014. Positive computing: technology for wellbeing and human potential. MIT Press.
[13]
Nicholas Carr. 2011. The shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains. WW Norton 8 Company.
[14]
Michael Chan. 2015. Mobile phones and the good life: Examining the relationships among mobile use, social capital and subjective well-being. New Media 8 Society 17, 1: 96--113.
[15]
A. A. Cohen, M. R. Levy, and K. Golden. 1988. Children's Uses and Gratifications of Home VCRs: Evolution or Revolution. Communication Research 15, 6: 772--780.
[16]
M Csikszentmihalyi and R Larson. 1987. Validity and reliability of the Experience-Sampling Method. J. Nerv. Ment. Dis. 175, 9:526--536.
[17]
Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan. 2008. Hedonia, eudaimonia, and well-being: An introduction. Journal of Happiness Studies 9, 1:1--11.
[18]
Matthew S Eastin. 2010. Handbook of Research on Digital Media and Advertising: User Generated Content Consumption: User Generated Content Consumption. IGI Global.
[19]
Nicole B. Ellison, Charles Steinfield, and Cliff Lampe. 2007. The Benefits of Facebook "Friends:" Social Capital and College Students' Use of Online Social Network Sites. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12, 4: 1143--1168.
[20]
Batya Friedman, Peter H. Kahn, and Alan Borning. 2009. Value Sensitive Design and Information Systems. In The Handbook of Information and Computer Ethics. John Wiley 8 Sons, Inc., 69--101.
[21]
Bin Fu, Jialiu Lin, Lei Li, Christos Faloutsos, Jason Hong, and Norman Sadeh. 2013. Why People Hate Your App: Making Sense of User Feedback in a Mobile App Store. In Proceedings of the 19th {ACM} {SIGKDD} International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD '13), 1276--1284.
[22]
Kevin A Hallgren. 2012. Computing Inter-Rater Reliability for Observational Data: An Overview and Tutorial. Tutor. Quant. Methods Psychol. 8, 1: 23--34.
[23]
Jennifer Healey. 2011. Recording Affect in the Field: Towards Methods and Metrics for Improving Ground Truth Labels. In Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction, 107--116.
[24]
Alexis Hiniker, Sungsoo (Ray) Hong, Tadayoshi Kohno, and Julie A. Kientz. 2016. MyTime: Designing and Evaluating an Intervention for Smartphone Non-Use. In CHI '16, 4746--4757.
[25]
Alexis Hiniker, Shwetak N. Patel, Tadayoshi Kohno, and Julie A. Kientz. 2016. Why would you do that? predicting the uses and gratifications behind smartphone-usage behaviors. In UbiComp '16, 634--645.
[26]
Alexis Hiniker, Kiley Sobel, Hyewon Suh, Yi-Chen Sung, Charlotte P. Lee, and Julie A. Kientz. 2015. Texting while parenting: How adults use mobile phones while caring for children at the playground. In CHI '15, 727--736.
[27]
Jihyuk Joo and Yoonmo Sang. 2013. Exploring Koreans' smartphone usage: An integrated model of the technology a cceptance model and uses and gratifications theory. Computers in Human Behavior 29, 6: 2512--2518.
[28]
Barbara K. Kaye. 1998. Uses and gratifications of the World Wide Web: From couch potato to web potato. New Jersey Journal of Communication 6, 1: 21--40.
[29]
Inyeop Kim, Gyuwon Jung, Hayoung Jung Minsam Ko, and Uichin Lee. 2017. Let's FOCUS. Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies 1, 3:1--29.
[30]
Jaejeung Kim, Chiwoo Cho, and Uichin Lee. 2017. Technology Supported Behavior Restriction for Mitigating Self-Interruptions in Multi-device Environments. Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies 1, 3:1--21.
[31]
Minsam Ko, Seungwoo Choi, Subin Yang, Joonwon Lee, and Uichin Lee. 2015. FamiLync: facilitating participatory parental mediation of adolescents' smartphone use. 867--878.
[32]
Minsam Ko, Seungwoo Choi, Koji Yatani, and Uichin Lee. 2016. Lock n' LoL. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '16, 998--1010.
[33]
Minsam Ko, Kyong-Mee Chung, Subin Yang, Joonwon Lee, Christian Heizmann, Jinyoung Jeong, Uichin Lee, Daehee Shin, Koji Yatani, and Junehwa Song. 2015. NUGU: A group-based intervention app for improving self-regulation of limiting smartphone use. In CSCW'15, 1235--1245.
[34]
Ksenia Koroleva, Hanna Krasnova, Natasha Veltri, and Oliver Günther. 2011. It's all about networking! empirical investigation of social capital formation on social network sites. In ICIS 2011 Proceedings. Retrieved from https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2011/proceedings/onlinecommunity/24
[35]
Hanna Krasnova, Helena Wenninger, Thomas Widjaja, and Peter Buxmann. 2013. Envy on Facebook: A hidden threat to users' life satisfaction? In 11th International Conference on Wirtschaftsinformatik.
[36]
Steven Eric Krauss. 2005. Research paradigms and meaning making: A primer. The qualitative report 10, 4: 758--770.
[37]
Ethan Kross, Philippe Verduyn, Emre Demiralp, Jiyoung Park, David Seungjae Lee, Natalie Lin, Holly Shablack John Jonides, and Oscar Ybarra. 2013. Facebook use predicts declines in subjective well-being in young adults. PLoS One 8, 8: e69841.
[38]
Alexandra Kuznetsova, Per Bruun Brockhoff, and Rune Haubo Bojesen Christensen. 2015. lmerTest: tests in linear mixed effects models. R package version 2.0.
[39]
Uichin Lee, Subin Yang, Minsam Ko, and Joonwon Lee. 2014. Supporting Temporary Non-Use of Smartphones. In In Refusing, Limitng, Departing: Why We Should Study. Technology Non-Use (CHI '14 Workshop).
[40]
L. Leung and R. Wei. 2000. More Than Just Talk on the Move: Uses and Gratifications of the Cellular Phone. Journalism 8 Mass Communication Quarterly 77, 2: 308--320.
[41]
David M Levy. 2016. Mindful Tech: How to Bring Balance to Our Digital Lives. Yale University Press.
[42]
Richard J Light. 1971. Measures of response agreement for qualitative data: Some generalizations and alternatives. Psychol. Bull. 76, 5: 365.
[43]
Markus Löchtefeld, Matthias Böhmer, and Lyubomir Ganev. 2013. AppDetox. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia - MUM '13, 1--2.
[44]
Kai Lukoff, Carol Moser, and Sarita Schoenebeck. 2017. Gender Norms and Attitudes about Childcare Activities Presented on Father Blogs. Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '17: 4966--4971.
[45]
Ulrik Lyngs. 2018. A Cognitive Design Space for Supporting Self-Regulation of ICT Use. In CHl'18 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems {forthcoming).
[46]
Ulrik Lyngs, Reuben Binns, Max van Kleek, and Nigel Shadbolt. 2018. "So, Tell Me What Users Want, What They Really, Really Want!" In CHI'18 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (forthcoming).
[47]
Kate Magsamen-Conrad, John Dowd, Mohammad Abuljadail, Saud Alsulaiman, and Adnan Shareefi. 2015. Life-Span Differences in the Uses and Gratifications of Tablets: Implications for Older Adults. Computers in human behavior 52: 96--106.
[48]
Abraham Maslow. 1965. Self-actualization and beyond.
[49]
M. Mazmanian. 2012. Avoiding the trap of constant connectivity: When congruent frames allow for heterogeneous practices. Academy of Management Journal.
[50]
Melissa Mazmanian. 2010. Understanding the BlackBerry: Negotiating connectivity in the different organizational worlds. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Doctoral Dissertation.
[51]
Sandra Metts, Susan Sprecher, William R Cupach, Barbara M Montgomery, and Steve Duck 1991. Retrospective self-reports. Studying interpersonal interaction: 162--178.
[52]
Stacey Morrison and Ricardo Gomez. 2013. Pushback: The Growth of Expressions of Resistance to Constant Online Connectivity Methods: A Literature Review on Pushback. 1--15.
[53]
Stacey Morrison and Ricardo Gomez. 2014. Pushback: Expressions of resistance to the "evertime" of constant online connectivity. First Monday 19, 8.
[54]
Cal Newport. 2016. Deep work: Rules for focused success in a distracted world. Hachette UK.
[55]
Will Oremus. 2016. Who Controls Your Facebook Feed. Slate. Retrieved from http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/cover_story/2016/01/how_facebook_s_news_feed_algorithm_works.html
[56]
Antti Oulasvirta, Tye Rattenbury, Lingyi Ma, and Eeva Raita. 2012. Habits make smartphone use more pervasive. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 16, 1:105--114.
[57]
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang. 2013. The distraction addiction: getting the information you need and the communication you want, without enraging your family, annoying your colleagues, and .... Hachette UK.
[58]
Laura Pina, Kael Rowan, Paul Johns, Asta Roseway, Gillian Hayes, and Mary Czerwinski. 2014. In Situ Cues for ADHD Parenting Strategies Using Mobile Technology. Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare.
[59]
Laura Portwood-Stacer. 2013. Media refusal and conspicuous non-consumption: The performative and political dimensions of Facebook abstention. New Media 8 Society 15, 7:1041--1057.
[60]
John Raacke and Jennifer Bonds-Raacke. 2008. MySpace and Facebook: applying the uses and gratifications theory to exploring friend-networking sites. Cyberpsychology 8 behavior: the impact of the Internet, multimedia and virtual reality on behavior and society 11, 2:169--74.
[61]
Ahmad Rahmati, Chad Tossell, Clayton Shepard, Philip Kortum, and Lin Zhong. 2012. Exploring iPhone Usage: The Influence of Socioeconomic Differences on Smartphone Adoption, Usage and Usability. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Human-computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI '12), 11--20.
[62]
Lee Rainie, Aaron Smith, and Maeve Duggan. 2013. Coming and going on Facebook. Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project.
[63]
John Rooksby, Parvin Asadzadeh, Mattias Rost, Alistair Morrison, and Matthew Chalmers. 2016. Personal Tracking of Screen Time on Digital Devices. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '16, 284--296.
[64]
Larry D. Rosen, L. Mark Carrier, and Nancy A. Cheever. 2013. Facebook and texting made me do it: Media-induced task- switching while studying. Computers in Human Behavior 29, 3: 948--958.
[65]
Alan M Rubin. 2009. Uses and gratifications. The SAGE handbook of media processes and effects.
[66]
Alan M. Rubin. 1983. Television uses and gratifications: The interactions of viewing patterns and motivations. Journal of Broadcasting 27, 1:37--51.
[67]
Alan M. Rubin. 1984. Ritualized and instrumental television viewing. Journal of Communication 34, 3: 67--77.
[68]
Alan M. Rubin and Elizabeth M. Perse. 1987. Audience Activity and Soap Opera Involvement A Uses and Effects Investigation. Human Communication Research 14, 2: 246--268.
[69]
Thomas E Ruggiero. 2009. Mass Communication and Society Uses and Gratifications Theory in the 21st Century. June 2014: 37--41.
[70]
James A Russell. 1980. A circumplex model of affect. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 39, 6:1161.
[71]
Christina Sagioglou and Tobias Greitemeyer. 2014. Facebook's emotional consequences: Why Facebook causes a decrease in mood and why people still use it. Comput. Human Behav. 35: 359--363.
[72]
Alireza Sahami Shirazi, Niels Henze, Tilman Dingier, Martin Pielot, Dominik Weber, and Albrecht Schmidt. 2014. Large-scale assessment of mobile notifications. Proceedings of the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems - CHI'14: 3055--3064.
[73]
Mohammad Salehan and Arash Negahban. 2013. Social networking on smartphones: When mobile phones become addictive. Computers in Human Behavior 29, 6: 2632--2639.
[74]
Sarita Yardi Schoenebeck. 2014. Giving up Twitter for Lent: How and Why We Take Breaks from Social Media. CHI 2014: 773--782.
[75]
Natasha Dow Schüll. 2012. Addiction by design: machine gambling in Las Vegas.
[76]
W J Severin and J W Tankard. 1997. Cognitive Consistency and Mass Communication. Communication Theories: Origins, Methods, and Uses in Mass Media: 159--177.
[77]
Choonsung Shin and Anind K Dey. 2013. Automatically Detecting Problematic Use of Smartphones. In Proceedings of the 2013 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp '13), 335--344.
[78]
Philippe Verduyn, David Seungjae Lee, Jiyoung Park, Holly Shablack, Ariana Orvell, Joseph Bayer, Oscar Ybarra, John Jonides, and Ethan Kross. 2015. Passive Facebook usage undermines affective well-being: Experimental and longitudinal evidence. J. Exp. Psychol. Gen. 144, 2: 480--488.
[79]
Anthony J Viera and Joanne M Garrett. 2005. Understanding interobserver agreement: the kappa statistic. Fam. Med. 37, 5: 360--363.
[80]
Robert A White. 1994. Audience interpretation of media: Emerging perspectives. Communication Research Trends 14, 3: 3--36.
[81]
QiangXu, Jeffrey Erman, Alexandre Gerber, Zhuoqing Mao, Jeffrey Pang, and Shobha Venkataraman. 2011. Identifying Diverse Usage Behaviors of Smartphone Apps. In Proceedings of the 2011 ACM SIGCOMM Conference on Internet Measurement Conference {IMC '11), 329--344.
[82]
Cissy Yu. Emotion-sampling. Emotion Sampling Study App. Retrieved from https://github.com/yucissy/Emotion-sampling
[83]
S Zika, K journal of psychology, and 1992. 1992. On the relation between meaning in life and psychological well-being. Wiley Online Library.
[84]
Mark Zuckerberg. Untitled Post - January 11, 2018. Facebook. Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10104413015393571
[85]
Time Well Spent. Time Well Spent. Retrieved from http://www.timewellspent.io
[86]
Android 5.0 APIs | Android Developers. Retrieved from https://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/usage/package-summary.html
[87]
Momentum Browser Extension. Retrieved January 25, 2018 from https://momentumdash.com/

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)The role of socio-emotional attributes in enhancing human-AI collaborationFrontiers in Psychology10.3389/fpsyg.2024.136995715Online publication date: 15-Oct-2024
  • (2024)The Relationship between Reasons for Smartphone Use, Addictive Use Tendencies, Fear of Missing Out, Depression, and Life Satisfaction: A Qualitative and Quantitative AnalysisPsychopathology10.1159/00053826357:5(359-368)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
  • (2024)Beyond Meditation: Understanding Everyday Mindfulness Practices and Technology Use Among Experienced PractitionersProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36870238:CSCW2(1-29)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies
Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies  Volume 2, Issue 1
March 2018
1370 pages
EISSN:2474-9567
DOI:10.1145/3200905
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 26 March 2018
Accepted: 01 January 2018
Revised: 01 January 2018
Received: 01 November 2017
Published in IMWUT Volume 2, Issue 1

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. Meaning
  2. eudaimonia
  3. habits
  4. persuasive design
  5. positive computing
  6. self-regulation
  7. social media
  8. uses 8 gratifications

Qualifiers

  • Research-article
  • Research
  • Refereed

Funding Sources

  • NSF
  • Intel Science & Technology Center on Pervasive Computing

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)1,220
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)225
Reflects downloads up to 18 Nov 2024

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)The role of socio-emotional attributes in enhancing human-AI collaborationFrontiers in Psychology10.3389/fpsyg.2024.136995715Online publication date: 15-Oct-2024
  • (2024)The Relationship between Reasons for Smartphone Use, Addictive Use Tendencies, Fear of Missing Out, Depression, and Life Satisfaction: A Qualitative and Quantitative AnalysisPsychopathology10.1159/00053826357:5(359-368)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
  • (2024)Beyond Meditation: Understanding Everyday Mindfulness Practices and Technology Use Among Experienced PractitionersProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36870238:CSCW2(1-29)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
  • (2024)Dialogues with Digital Wisdom: Can LLMs Help Us Put Down the Phone?Proceedings of the 2024 International Conference on Information Technology for Social Good10.1145/3677525.3678640(56-61)Online publication date: 4-Sep-2024
  • (2024)ScreenTK: Seamless Detection of Time-Killing Moments Using Continuous Mobile Screen Text and On-Device LLMsCompanion of the 2024 on ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing10.1145/3675094.3677547(196-200)Online publication date: 5-Oct-2024
  • (2024)Digital Wellbeing Lens: Design Interfaces That Respect User AttentionProceedings of the 2024 International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces10.1145/3656650.3656674(1-5)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2024
  • (2024)Digital Wellbeing Redefined: Toward User-Centric Approach for Positive Social Media EngagementProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 11th International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems10.1145/3647632.3651392(95-98)Online publication date: 14-Apr-2024
  • (2024)Social Media Breaks: An Opportunity for Recovery and ProcrastinationProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36373998:CSCW1(1-46)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
  • (2024)Designing Data Visualisations for Self-Compassion in Personal InformaticsProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/36314487:4(1-22)Online publication date: 12-Jan-2024
  • (2024)"I Just Don’t Care Enough To Be Interested": Teens’ Moment-By-Moment Experiences on InstagramProceedings of the 23rd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference10.1145/3628516.3655812(14-29)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2024
  • Show More Cited By

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Login options

Full Access

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media