Predicting the next decade of mobile communication studies research: More mobile media, fewer mobile phones

Abstract

The growth of Mobile Media & Communication (MMC) in the journal’s first decade has been both remarkable and somewhat understandable. On the one hand, the journal—and mobile communication studies (MCS) as a field more generally—have made amazing strides in just 10 years, going from a brand-new journal in 2013 to one of the International Communication Association’s top journals by 2022. On the other hand, the growth is somewhat explainable because mobile phones have now become the dominant form of contemporary communication media. Back whenMMC published its inaugural issue, smartphones were still relatively new (at least in academic research terms) and there was a relatively small number of communication researchers who focused on mobile phone practices. But that is obviously no longer the case. At this point, most media studies research focuses on smartphones because most media are accessed through smartphones. Consequently, while the rise of the smartphone helped MMC and MCS grow, simply studying smartphones has not been what has cemented MCS as an identifiable field of research (Campbell, 2019). Instead, MCS has continued to develop as a field because of the community of researchers and, maybe most importantly, MMC. Without the mobile research community and MMC as a venue to set the tone for the field, we could have easily been swallowed up by more established communication fields. In fact, I suspect that’s exactly what would have happened as smartphones became ubiquitous and smartphone research became far too prevalent to group it all under the MCS label. If all we had tying us together as a research community was “we study mobile phones,” then we would have little reason to exist in 2022 when most communication research is at least tangentially