Nature or Nurture? An Analysis of Rational Addiction to Mobile Social Applications

Through the lens of rational addiction theory (Becker and Murphy, 1988), this study investigates whether addiction to mobile social apps should be viewed as a rational behavior rather than an uncontrollable, irrational disorder. To derive the analytical model, this study extends the rational addiction framework to include a utility-level network effect as the key factor that regulates the inter-temporal consumption of mobile social apps. Further, to validate empirically the rational addiction model in this context, we gathered and analyzed longitudinal panel data on the weekly app usage of thousands of smartphone users. The findings suggest that consistent with the rational addiction theory, users of mobile social apps are rational and forward-looking. They determine their current consumption based on both past and future consumption and the utility derived from network effects. However, the extent of rational addiction to mobile social apps varies considerably across diverse demographic groups and app categories

Digital Media versus Human Communicativity: the Emotional and Family Communication Dimension

The media’s permeation into the human ecosystem has adjusted the hitherto traditional relationship with digital spatiality, time, culture and human communication. This paper identified the interconnectivity between the concepts of digital spatiality, time, culture, human communication and divorce rate by critically appraising their impact with a focus on the family, being the microcosm of society. Through Emotional Intelligence Theory, this paper indicated emotional connections as the object and subject of digital spatiality, time, culture, and human communication. This is relevant at this period that the media has permeated our social system and ecology. This paper deployed textual and conceptual content analyses to unearth finding on the topic. Findings showed that technology grows exponentially through time and cultures, easing communication. However, divorce rates are also exponentially higher through time and cultures despite the ease in communication via technological innovations. Therefore, this study is significant at this time of new media challenges in family communication. Also, in the aspects of self-disclosure and applying emotional intelligence for human communicativity online and trans-culturally. Further research and integration of emotional intelligence in communication innovations in homes, relationships, and the entire human existence should be further explored based on the findings. Keywords: Family-Communication, New media, Emotional Intelligence, Self-Disclosure, Human-Communication DOI: 10.7176/NMMC/96-06 Publication date:May 31st 202

Flawless devices, faulty users: Finnish young adults’ representations of smartphone usage

Finnish smartphone users lead the global statistics of data usage. This makes them an ideal consumer group to research technology consumption practices. It has been estimated that consumers use their smartphones as much as one third of the time that they are awake. The device has become essential in everyday life as consumers have it always with them and it is always on. Smartphone usage has been researched for example in terms of technology adaptation and desired functionalities, but the research on consumers’ emotions towards technology is limited. The focus of this study is especially in the contradictions and paradoxes that Finnish young adults express in their narratives of theirsmartphones and smartphone usage. Past research on technology paradoxes, information technology development, postmodern consumption culture and social constructivism on technology serve as theoretical background for the study. This study has been done by using qualitative research methods. The data consists of ten interviews and projective techniques including sentence compilations and autodriving. Young Finnish adults who live in big cities and have high education were selected for the interviews, as statistically they are heavy users of smartphones, thus making them interesting subject of technology paradox research. The findings of this study outline the major mismatch in consumers’ narratives: they perceive their smartphones as useful and capable devices but consider their own smartphone consumption as incapable and counterproductive, which results into feelings of distress, anxiety and guilt. This misusage appears in multiple forms, interpreted in four themes of guilt: using smartphones to procrastinate, damaging meaningful social relations with smartphone usage, misusing or overdosing the massive amount of content and not meeting the expectations to be available. The narrative of flawless device and faulty user has implications both for consumer research and for management. The main contribution of this study is to widen the focus of academic legacy from the paradoxes of technology to the paradoxes of technology consumption. The study portrays the shift from consumers’ perceptions of their smartphones as devices to perceptions of themselves as smartphone users. This offers a fruitful basis for further research on technology consumption, which is an inseparable part of postmodern life

Social, Casual and Mobile Games

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Social, casual and mobile games, played on devices such as smartphones, tablets, or PCs and accessed through online social networks, have become extremely popular, and are changing the ways in which games are designed, understood, and played. These games have sparked a revolution as more people from a broader demographic than ever play games, shifting the stereotype of gaming away from that of hardcore, dedicated play to that of activities that fit into everyday life. Social, Casual and Mobile Games explores the rapidly changing gaming landscape and discusses the ludic, methodological, theoretical, economic, social and cultural challenges that these changes invoke. With chapters discussing locative games, the new freemium economic model, and gamer demographics, as well as close studies of specific games (including Candy Crush Saga, Angry Birds, and Ingress), this collection offers an insight into the changing nature of games and the impact that mobile media is having upon individuals and societies around the world

Social representations of marketplace immorality:The case of the Kenyan illicit alcohol market

This thesis examines social representations of marketplace immorality in a context of contested legitimacy. In recent years, the legislative context of illicit alcohol in Kenya has changed the status of illicit alcohol from legal to illegal, then back to legal, between June 2015 and February 2016. Using social representations theory, this study explores the dominant social representations in the Kenyan illicit alcohol market during this volatile regulatory period. The study draws on longitudinal data from digital mainstream and social media news sites, as well as interview and observation data. The study seeks to expand understanding on the extent to which social representations convey morality, and the impact of social representations on people’s perceptions and practices, thereby extending knowledge and understanding of social representations and morality. Consumer research has begun to consider issues relating to morality in the marketplace, but this is still a nascent area of research. Most studies on morality have explored only a subset of moral concerns but this study expands the conceptualization of morality in a market context responding to calls from market researchers for a broader definition of consumer morality. The study focuses on plural moral domains with several moral concerns and highlights both individual-centred and other-centred moral concerns. The study also demonstrates that social representations in the alcohol market focus on the harm from illicit consumption practices leading to selective objectification of consumer and alcohol problems and limiting remedial initiatives in the marketplace. The findings also reveal that cognitive polyphasia is a pervasive feature in the social representations of the Kenyan illicit alcohol market. Key aspects of cognitive polyphasia that define some of its functionalities and how it could be operationalised are a nascent area in the study of social representations. This study’s findings contribute to the existing knowledge on cognitive polyphasia by revealing cognitive polyphasia as a means of adapting to change, coping with change, resisting change and inducing change. The study also contributes to knowledge on the delegitimization of market practices by examining the role of cognitive polyphasia in changing practices and perceptions. The study findings also illustrate moral ambiguities in the marketplace as well as the psychological and socio-psychological processes used to navigate the moral ambiguities. The processes illustrated include social representation, moral exclusion, moral rationalization, moral decoupling and moral override. These processes provide insights into the reasoning and justifications behind why consumers would or would not act in an ethical or moral manner. The research further contributes to the literature on morality by highlighting the influence of emotions in moral judgement. These findings confirm previous empirical research in moral psychology on the role of emotion in moral judgement. The study proposes greater emphasis on emotional appeals in efforts to encourage moral consumer behaviour since emotions are revealed as key to moral judgement. The practical implications of this research are mainly in relation to the incorporation of community cultural language when talking about, or implementing illicit alcohol policy, to help make the policies a part of the local culture

Gambling against Rawls

In A Theory of Justice (1971) John Rawls attempted to solve the problem of distributive justice by combining self-interest, ignorance and risk-aversion. He argued that if self-interested persons in a situation of uncertainty imposed by a veil of ignorance were choosing principles for the basic structure of society, then they would be risk-adverse and choose two principles – The Principle of Equal Liberty and the Difference Principle. Critics have argued against this risk-adverse element of Rawls’ theory but those critics as well as Rawls made certain presuppositions about risk-aversion, risk-taking and gambling. This thesis also examines the risk-aversion in Rawls’ theory but addresses the previous shortfall by exploring the issue of risk and gambling in two interrelated ways. It applies a Foucauldian approach to the history of risk and gambling in order to contextualise the current views and then investigates the contemporary meaning by drawing on research leading up to the UK Gambling Act 2005. Drawing on these findings it argues that not only might risk-taking occur in the original position but that different types of participants could show different degrees of risk-taking behaviour. By exploring the theoretical debates between essentialism and anti-essentialism, it further argues that it is unlikely that the veil of ignorance would be able to screen out those differences. It then employs theories of identity and difference in the work of Heidegger, Deleuze and Lyotard in an attempt to overcome that weakness in Rawls’ theory but finds that this may not be possible. After highlighting a connection between impartiality and gambling, it concludes, in contrast to Rawls, that risk-taking rather than risk-aversion lies at the heart of social justice. The implication of this reversal is that it may have an impact on policy-decisions in other areas of the justice system

Stillborn: The Libidinal Economy of Gadgetized Mediation in the Era of Socialization for Consumption; An Explanatory Political Project

This project captures an attempt to politicize one aspect of Western middle class youth’s everyday experience growing up and living in postindustrial consumer society—the replacement of experiential, material, and libidinal gratification with that of ideological satisfaction. The dissertation takes up problematic adolescent gaming as a site to interrogate the ways and means of technologically-backed consumer socialization, and draw out the implications for subject-formation and possibility of self-determination. Developing new ways to conceptualize politics of youth, the project re-reads existing academic research on youth and gaming. Its main goal is to create a theoretical framework that can sustain an understanding of the importance of consumerizing gadget-mediated self-self cultivation across the dimensions of political economy and its strict materiality, psycho-sociality and its relational concreteness, and the realm of the mind in which ideology meets consciousness. Under the guise of critiquing the banality of gaming studies, the project excavates ideas from various critical theory, phenomenological and psychoanalytic traditions to raise political questions of social reproduction and clarify a concretely political path beyond the present circumstances. I am interested in exploring how it is that generation after generation young people born in the compromised consumption-rendered centers of global capital do not revolt against the seemingly repressive institutions shaping their lives. In this question, there is an intergenerational politics, a politics in which the question of youth and their otherness is crashed into the structuration of political economy and social reproduction within it. This is ultimately the theme of my inquiry. The present work is a study of gaming as a site where we should expect to see the manifestations of this kind of intersection, but instead what we see is a single-minded preference for celebrating the gaming industry and securing the ideologically soothing reproduction. I want to address the politics signaled by the changing role of play in advanced consumer economy, where in the site of gaming, through controlled bursts of traumatization and regularization, prediction of subjective experience is commodified into the global capitalistic circuits

How individuals experience and make sense of their problematic mephedrone use : an interpretative phenomenological analysis

There has been a significant increase in the number of people using club drugs and entering treatment for problematic club drug use in the United Kingdom. It has been suggested, based on socio-demographics, that the treatment needs of such users are different from those of users of traditional drugs, and consequently specialist club drug clinics were introduced. However, to date no research has explored the subjective experience of problematic club drug use to substantiate an understanding of users’ psychological treatment needs or the subjective psychological motivations to use club drugs, or how such users self-identify rather than being categorised in terms of socio-demographics. This research aims to answer these questions, with a focus on mephedrone, one of the most newly identified and popularly used club drugs in the United Kingdom. Semi-structured interviews with six male users of mephedrone were analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis. Findings suggested that the subjective experience of mephedrone use is like that of traditional drug use, and consequently that corresponding users’ psychological treatment needs are similar. The subjective motivation to use mephedrone was primarily concerned with a want to appease identity distress, a common precursor to substance misuse. Users of mephedrone appeared to make sense of their problematic use by progressing through the stages of change. Moreover, findings implied that stigmatising beliefs operated within the drug-using community, which facilitated the social construction of mephedrone as harmless in comparison to traditional drugs. This perception was found to be further propagated by terminology such as “club drugs” that are used within the professional arena and represent mephedrone as “fun”. Not only did the socially constructed image of mephedrone as harmless and fun encourage its use, it appeared to prevent users self-identifying with the stereotypical identity of problematic substance misuse commonly associated with traditional drug use. This potentially acted as a barrier against users of club drugs seeking treatment from generalised services based on the needs of traditional drug use, thus highlighting the necessity for specialised club drug clinics. Implications of this research include introducing the under-represented area of problematic substance misuse to counselling psychology to promote the applicability of counselling psychologists to work in this field. This research fills the imperative training gap experienced by healthcare professionals based in the United Kingdom in relation to the understanding of problematic club drug use, and does so by providing subjective knowledge of the experience of problematic mephedrone use in order to develop the psychological treatments delivered. Furthermore, this research advocates the introduction of policies that would reduce the harm caused by mephedrone and demystify its socially constructed image. One such policy would be to suggest interventions to distribute information concerning the harms associated with mephedrone. Another would be to reframe the professional language used to describe club drugs. Lastly, this study highlights the need for further investigation into the stigmatising beliefs operating within the drug-using community that potentially act as a barrier preventing users of mephedrone from seeking treatment