When your out and about, running around town, and you have some time to kill while waiting in line or commuting, chances are you whip out your mobile phone and start catching up on what’s going on with your friends and around the world. This was always assumed to be the ultimate use case for mobile devices and now Ohio State University has confirmed it after studying the media consumption habits of 166 people between the ages of 18 and 68. The participants of this study were asked to record what type of device they used to consume content and when they accessed said content. They found that computers were the most popular gadget for getting news: 24% said desktops, 15% said laptops, for a total of 39%. In second place came the all mighty boob tube, scoring 29%. Both newspapers and radio earned 9%, and in last place are mobile devices with just 7%. How can this be? Isn’t mobile supposed to change the world?
“Typically, what happens with new media is that they compete with and displace older media to a certain extent, like television did with radio,” said Professor John Dimmick. “But at least early in its development, mobile media isn’t taking us away from older media—it has its own separate niche.” The research shows that 58% of all news is consumed at home, 21.4% at work, and 10% while in a vehicle, but that because of the unique characteristic of mobile people tend to read the news in small bursts while they’re in transit or waiting for something.
Now of course there’s a catch to all this data. It was gathered in 2007, the same year the first iPhone came out. We all know what’s happened since then, and how because of Android nearly a third of all mobile phone owners in the United States had a smartphone in Q4 2010. Still, we can’t imagine the results changing too drastically, at least for those of us who aren’t glued to our tiny screens all day.