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In the digital world, the arrival of smartphones has expanded the scope of social media to mobile social media. Mobile devices and social media together present a lot of opportunities for mobile business and online marketing (Pelet & Papadopoulou, 2015). Nowadays, social media is predominantly accessed from a mobile phone (Mehra et al., 2020) rather than desktops or computers. It may be due to some additional advantages gained through increased personalization (Cloarec, 2020) and the ability to communicate during transit (Yang et al., 2021) specifically offered by mobile social media. It is considered the channel by which different social media applications could be accessed through smartphones or handheld devices for the sole purpose of the interaction, exchange, and development of user-generated content (Ju et al., 2021). Mobile social media is a software-based service that could be accessed through a mobile phone or any other handheld device for sharing news or some other relevant information (Humphreys, 2013) via an app or a mobile browser. It has also emerged as a vital source to generate customer value (Ju et al., 2021) and is considered an important medium for information retrieval, interaction, and fun (Zhao, 2021). Mobile phones have emerged as an integral part of the social life of individuals (Chua et al., 2018). Consequently, several mobile social media applications have emerged with time and have become an important part of the day to day life. These applications such as Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Whatsapp, etc. have changed the way people communicate and spend their time. There may be different motivations among individuals to use these applications.
Variable age is considered an important factor affecting the online behavior of an individual (Rialti et al., 2019; Sheldon et al., 2021). Marketing studies highlight the importance of age in technology acceptance and reveal that younger generations mostly have a positive attitude toward the adoption of new technology (Nash, 2019; Vasudeva & Chawla, 2019) and this may also be true in the case of mobile social media. There is a digital divide in technology usage among the generations in terms of age (Berezan et al., 2018; Friemel, 2016). It is observed that the younger generations i.e. generation X and generation Y have sought greater research attention in terms of their preference and use of technology than the elderly generation baby boomers (Heaney, 2007; Muslim et al., 2019; Nash, 2019). So, it becomes imperative to conduct some research on the technology adoption of the elderly vis-à-vis the young consumers.