Abstract
The literature on social connectedness through mobile phone engagement reveals positive tacit opportunities. Mobile phone engagement hosts micro and macro opportunities to start and maintain a sense of social connectedness. Increasing a sense of social connectedness encourages healthier emotional well-being among people, reducing potential feelings of isolation and chances of faster recovery from illness. Mobile social media access, participation and messaging, be it face-to-face, peer-to-peer, group or virtual, through intentional and unintentional social connectedness, may aid the improvement and performance among workers, students and campaigns. Mobile engagement also offers possible improvement in performance and enhanced perceptions of emotional well-being. Engagement through social media networks, mostly accessed via mobile, including mobile gaming, or health monitoring, commenting or posting photos or short texts, increases the production and value of successful maintenance of reciprocal interpersonal relationships.
TopBackground
The advent in 2001 and maturation standard of Multimedia Messaging Services (MMS) in 2002, extended text messaging to include, photos, animations (gifs), audio and /or video clips (MMS London, 2016). WAP Mobile communication services like Mixit, WhatsApp, and Kakao, broke the mobile messaging hold from mobile service providers, offering agnostic, and globally free access to one’s contacts and Social Media Network Services (SMNS) communities. With features that encompasses voice notes, synchronous voice and video calling, to time set message deletion as with Snap Chat, all of which presents the ability to communicate with others and can serve as a powerful means to foster a sense of connectedness. Lam, (2012), and Ling (2015) as well as Cumiskey & Ling (2015) offers examples of how the mobile phone hosts a way for improving team attitude, playful identity, and social cohesion. While other multimodal messages are sent during a live or televised event, cultivating co-presence (Cui, 2016; Schroeder, 2010). The agnostic mobile messaging services have become the communication method of choice for building, as well as maintaining social connectedness, but also aids how individuals and groups traverse the different spaces of their lives.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Co-presence: The practice of people engaging in real-time face-to-face social activities and being engrossed in the here and now of that social activity, but also being virtually present and via texting or mobile messaging with dual occupation of real and virtual space.
Socio-Emotional: The concept of socio-emotional aspects refers to a person initiating, cultivating and responding to others, to form relationships with other people in their lives such as parents, relatives and friends. These socio-emotional aspects can be ephemeral or long-standing, when it comes to interactions with people. Typically with familiar, but not excluding unfamiliar people. It can span the spectrum of how people interact with others to how they manage communication or cope with adversity, stress, establish positive relationship and the capacity to develop relationships with peers, often times through communication.
Mobile Social Media: Social communication and networking where affiliated individuals with dis/similar interests converse and connect virtually and/or in-person with one another through their mobile phone, handheld and/or tablet device.
Connected Presence: Unconstrained connections from time and place, refers to people situated in a different physical location, but splitting their attention and connecting via virtual means with another location or person located elsewhere.
Mobile Messaging: Mobile messaging typically from a mobile phone or mobile device. Examples include SMS texting, Multimedia Message Service (MMS) to a host of wireless access protocol (WAP) mobile messaging services like WhatsApp, WeChat, Kakao, Kik, Line, etc. The latter being device agnostic, meaning they can be installed and used on many different types of mobile phone platforms.
Mobile Crowdsourcing: Mobile crowdsourcing describes the collation of a large group of people’s views and/or observations. These crowdsourcing activities are processed on mobile phones or other handheld mobile devices.
Mobile Learning: Also known as mLearning refers to creating, leveraging or designing learning opportunities via portable technologies from and/or for interpersonal and organizational mobile communication.
Social Connectedness: Concept often been used to characterize degrees of interpersonal trust, attachment security, social competency, and a sense of belonging, online and in real world.