Going online used to mean going someplace where there was a computer plugged into an Ethernet cable, but increasingly, going online now means pulling out your mobile device. And in many parts of the world, the mobile internet is the only internet.
Recent data from the Pew Research Center show that, as of 2018, 95 percent of American adults have a mobile phone and 77 percent of us own smartphones. That’s up from 35 percent just seven years earlier. When we just look at young adults, ages 18–29, 100 percent of them have mobile phones, and 94 percent have smartphones. That stereotypical image of young people always having their nose in their phone does have some basis in fact. If we look at it from the point of view of the media providers, we see that 45 percent of U.S. adults often get news from a mobile device compared to 36 percent who often get news from their desktop computer or laptop.
Another way to get a feel for the growing impact of mobile media is to look at the size of the audience for various channels. Those that allow people to express themselves publically through their mobile devices have much bigger audiences than those that call for passive consumption. So Facebook has an audience of 2 billion, YouTube has 1.5 billion, and the Super Bowl (on television) has an audience of 119 million. Think about it—the Super Bowl has just over 5 percent of the audience size of Facebook.
If you look outside the United States, the use of mobile media becomes even more significant. Among refugees from Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East, mobile media are the only media people have access to. During the Arab Spring movement in Egypt in 2011, much of the news coming out of the country was by way of mobile phones.
Computers and laptops are still important tools for going online, but with the growing power, size, and availability
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