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