Mobile phones in young people everyday life: case study with Portuguese and Brazilian students1

Artigo está licenciado sob forma de uma licença Creative Commons Atribuição 4.0 Internacional. Abstract: Mobile phones have become commonplace everyday objects in almost all societies regardless of their development stage. The presence of these devices has become a constant on any latitude, as shown by the penetration rate figures for 2018: 65.9%. These numbers, already surprising on their own, reach even higher values among young people. Thus, this paper studies the use of mobile phones, in particular smartphones, by young Portuguese and Brazilian university students. For this purpose, an app that registered all the uses made by the youngsters in their mobile devices, was employed. This methodology allows data collection in a daily context without the participants feeling controlled. A total of 317,938 interactions, registered in the participants devices, shows that the main use given to these devices is as a platform for access to social networks, followed by the sending of messages and the variable “second uses” of the device (watch, calendar, camera, calendar and calculator). Although this is a study in progress, at this stage it is safe to state that the data confirm previous studies (FORTUNATI; TAIPALE, 2014) in which smartphones assert themselves as a verbal written communication platform in opposition to their genesis based on orality.


Introduction
Throughout history, new technologies have always been a motor for social development, however, never before were they within the reach of the majority. Either due to economic reasons (high costs) or because their purpose was the collective usufruct, never has a new technology played such a central role in society as the one currently held by mobile technologies associated with mobile phones.
The social dynamic that allows a constant adaptation between technologies and societies (LASEN, 2004) has been particularly enthusiastic in the case of mobile phones, with these devices shaping society and vice versa.
Technological developments cause changes in users' attitudes, which in turn generate new social and cultural phenomena that also require technologies to evolve in order to respond to consumer demands (AOKI; DOWNES, 2003).

This paper studies how a specific group -young
Portuguese and Brazilian university students -uses their smartphone. For this purpose, an application was developed and installed in the student's devices during a month that allowed monitoring what type of use they gave to their mobile phone. During the period under analysis, 317,938 interactions were registered, of which the 64,881 related to the use of mobile applications in smartphones were studied in the realm of this research.
Resorting to an application to monitor the use of the devices permitted the understanding of the role of smartphones from a context of uncontrolled use. Thus, this methodology differs from the classical methodologies used for this type of research (such as interviews, research and controlled experiments) or daily use (WEI, 2007), proposing an approach to data in a daily context. Data analysis revealed that these devices are largely used as platforms for/to access to social networks, overriding significantly their secondary use -sending messages and the device's "second uses" variable (clock, calendar, camera, calendar and calculator). Other procedures displayed in the study are navigation (4th), voice service which was the genesis of the mobile phone (5th), video consumption (6th), music consumption (7th), e-mail (8th) and access to news (9th). In addition, it is anticipated that the emergence of more affordances and the response to new user's needs will fuel the innovation process that will reinforce the role of mobile phones in society.

The mobile phone in present day society
Today' ubiquity of communication allows us to be near and far at the same time (TURKLE, 2017). Virtuality is an omnipresent, interconnected and diversified system (CASTELLS; MAJER; GERHARDT, 2002) with information virtualization permeating the deterritorialisation of LÉVY (1996).

An investigation by Pew Research (RAINIE;
ZICKUHR, 2015, n/p) states that "'always on' mobile connectivity possess new challenges for users about when to be present with those nearby or engaged with other on their screens" Mobile devices have altered the way we consume, process and relate to information and others, with its originality it allowed this to happen simultaneously in emerging and developed countries albeit in different ways. Aker and Mbiti (2010: 209) illustrate this reality with an example: "while the telecommunications industry in the United States, Canada and Europe invested in 3/12 landlines before moving to mobile phone networks, the mobile phone has effectively skipped the landline in Africa". That is, in developing countries there was no slowdown in cell phone broadcasting due to the lack of fixed lines, on the contrary, a jump occurred directly to mobile phones. The reasons for the success of mobile phones rely on features inherited from the landline phone, which Keep friends and family connected (Wellman & Tindall, 1993) and reduce isolation and anxiety (Fisher, 1992), plus those that are characteristic of these devices, such as Feeling After more than ten years of this last shift, a more mature use of this technology can now be assessed and thus the understanding of how it influences different strata of society. It is no longer talked of early adopters or users still infected by the fetish of new technology, but of a technology so appropriate by society that it has become an essential element to its normal functioning.
Despite this, the younger continue to maintain a special interest in the emerging technological innovations, thus being an important group to evaluate the tendencies of future. Revista FAMECOS, Porto Alegre, v. 27, p. 1-12, jan.-dez. 2020 | e-34549 Young people and mobile phones can be called Digital Natives, as they are "native speakers" of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet." The remaining users can be seen as Digital Immigrants, since they have come to live and use these technologies throughout their lives.

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For the young university students of this study, usually aged between 17 and 26 years old in the Brazilian and Portuguese context, mobile phones have been part of their universe since the beginning of their school life. The relationship of this group with these devices is so strong that even new skills are required or even coveted. Turkle (2015, n / p) comments that some college students report that they are able to look someone in the eye while typing on their smartphones: "They say it's a skill they mastered in middle school when they wanted to text in class without getting caught. Now they use it when they want to be both with their friends and, as some put it, 'elsewhere'".
Regarding the use of smartphones by university students, a survey, based on questionnaires answered by 1,566 students (4% of the Institution's total students), conducted at Purdue University in the United States, showed a preference of the participants for apps in detriment of the use of the mobile browser (BOWEN; PISTILLI, 2012).
The authors also realized that as users become more advanced in the use of handsets, apps consumption tends to increase while browser consumption remains unchanged. Students reported that they use mobile applications mainly for games (1st place), time (2nd place), music (3rd place), geolocation (4th place), social networks (5th place), entertainment (6th place), news (7th place), education (8th place), sports (9th place), references (10th place) and shopping (11th place).
It should be borne in mind that this is the usage referred to by the user, that is, what he/she says he/she does and not the measurement of his/hers actual use, as in the present investigation. Lastly, the research also points out that most students find apps faster (68%) and easier to use (70%) when compared to browser or browser access. Thus, it can be said that digital natives prefer apps, the focus of this study.

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Full understanding of the role of smartphones in the daily life of the audiences, especially in uncontrolled contexts, has been a point of discussion among researchers in the area. Wei

Results and discussion
After monitoring the mobile phones of the participants in the study (28 in total and 23 employed), this is the general record of the activities: We can see that the use of applications represents 20.4% of registered movements; therefore, a total of N = 64,881 interactions, the sample we have subsequently worked at the statistical level.
Before proceeding with the report of the main results of this study, it is convenient to clarify several pertinent methodological aspects. The first one consisted in the recoding of the nominal variable (chain) "name of the application", which registered a total of 376 options, in another numerical nominal in which each category was assigned a value or label (from 1 to 376). Subsequently, and from this numerical variable, it was possible to proceed to its recoding in different dummy variables (presence "1" or absence "0" of the element in question), corresponding to the main mobile applications that focused our interest.
In the same way, and taking as a standpoint a total of 8 registered social networks (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, Tinder, Tumblr and WhatsApp), their values were computed to form an "Indicator of Interaction with Social Networks" (from now on referred as I2SN), whose range goes from "0" to "1".
Following this strategy, an "Indicator of Second Uses" (hereinafter, ISU) was also created, with the same rank, related to pre-existing elements of the appearance of the mobile phone; this is: camera, calculator, recorder, calendar and clock.

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However, and before showing the results of the aggregated indicators, let's analyse the descriptive data related to the different social networks, a topic of undeniable interest in the current media arena: It is attested that the most fashionable social network at present is Instagram, protagonist in more than 12% of the interactions, followed by WhatsApp and Facebook, which are around 10% each. If we take their means as a reference, we can affirm that the differences between the 9 social networks are statistically significant [λ w = 0.662, F (8, 64873) = 4146.61, p < 0.001, η 2 = 0.338] and fit a "small" effect size (Cohen, 1988). In this sense, and as However, both differences are considered "small" depending on the size of the effect (COHEN, 1988).
Regarding the correlations that occur between the 4 main social networks (the other 5 were discarded for this analysis because they presence is almost residual), see the following matrix of correlations:  Revista FAMECOS, Porto Alegre, v. 27, p. 1-12, jan.-dez. 2020 | e-34549 negative, so the more the interaction with one of them increases, the more the other decreases.
On the other hand, we established two groups of users according to their geographical origin: Portugal (n = 12 users) or Brazil (n = 11 users); which permitted to establish comparisons in terms of the interactions that ones and the others make with the main social networks. Thus, based on the average of the interactions, see the differences in the following graph:  = 8146.87, p < 0.001, η 2 = 0.501], and adjust to a "medium" effect size (Cohen, 1988 based on the size of the effect (Cohen, 1988).

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From the data, it is noticeable that the highest