Mobile social media: The challenges and opportunities continue

Abstract

When the inaugural issue ofMobile Media and Communication (MMC) was published in 2013, I began my article with the story of the Lovegety, a stand-alone device in Japan in the late 1990s that would beep when within 5 meters of another Lovegety device on the same setting, either “chatting,” “karaoke,” or “get2” (Humphreys, 2013). This example demonstrated several important aspects of mobile social media. First, the use of a stand-alone device was out of place given the mobile phone, app-centric environment. Second, the Lovegety’s connectivity was based on proximity, not locality. There were no location-based data collected on such devices. Third, the Lovegety demonstrated that mobile social media were not always tied to mobile phones. In this article, I want to reflect on what these three aspects mean for mobile social media in 2023. WhenMMC first launched, it seemed unfathomable that a separate device, such as the Lovegety, would connect people rather than an app on a smartphone. Indeed from 2008– 2013, there was exponential growth in apps (Goggin, 2021; Morris & Murray, 2018). Today, however, given the rise of “smart” objects and appliances, devices such as the Lovegety do not seem unusual. Plenty of things “talk” to each other (Frith, 2019). It is, however, the case that such objects or things are now also connected to our mobile devices and ultimately the Internet (Bunz & Meikle, 2017), whereas the Lovegety was not accessible through a mobile phone or the Internet. If the Lovegety were to exist