Examining the Rise of Mobile Phone and Internet Usage
Kaela Bautista, Samantha Cheung, Marco Correa
It’s hard to think of a time when having a mobile phone wasn’t the norm. In fact, most of Generation Z and Generation Alpha grew up with smartphones on hand, providing them with a streamlined connection to the internet. It’s become so common to see people that own a mobile phone that it’s strange to find someone who doesn’t own one. However, there was a time when access to mobile phones and the internet was sparse, and news and resources took longer than a few hours, or even a few minutes, to spread around the world. Back then, how could a student in the United States learn more about a country on the opposite side of the globe without searching through an encyclopedia or combing the internet slowly on a desktop computer? The speed and vastness of information readily available to us via the internet and mobile devices have allowed us to expand our knowledge as well as share it with others around the world almost instantly. It’s far easier and quicker now to connect with someone in Australia or to search up the latest news in Ghana. What else has changed since the rise of mobile phone and internet usage?
Internet + Mobile Phone Usage
As cell phones developed into smartphones, “the purpose of the cell phone has shifted from a verbal communication tool to a multimedia tool” (Ray, 2015). Instead of making calls, users can surf the internet, take pictures, stream entertainment, and connect with people around the world through messages or videos. Since the year 2000, there has been an increase in mobile phone and internet usage across the globe, expanding each country’s online reach and, in turn, affecting each country’s economic growth and quality of life, which can be seen in Figure 1. We see a gradual increase in both internet usage and mobile phone usage because as technology has continued to make great advancements throughout the years, most cellular devices now have access to the internet. For reference, according to the Pew Research Center, 97% of Americans own a cellphone, in which 85% of those Americans who own a cellphone use a smartphone (2021). Because smartphones have become more and more accessible to people, access to the internet has also increased which shows that there is a positive relationship between internet usage and mobile phone usage. Since we are interested in how the technological era has had an effect on the population, it is important to note how related both of these trends are to each other.
Life Expectancy
It may be strange to think that life expectancy can be affected by the rate of internet usage. However, one possible reason as to how life expectancy can be influenced by internet usage is due to the fact that access to the internet can be connected to economic stability (Lee & Kim, 2018). Another possibility may be because the internet can be used as an outlet where people can express themselves and connect with other like-minded people, making their overall life experiences more enjoyable. Although we see an increase in life expectancy as internet usage in the countries increases, there may be other factors that influence life expectancy as well (Figure 2). In a 2017 study on Asian countries between 2009 and 2014, it was shown that there was a positive correlation between internet usage and life expectancy (Lee & Kim, 2018). Though the study doesn’t show that internet usage and mobile phone usage have a drastic effect on life expectancy, they do have some influence on it which may be worth exploring, especially in developing countries.
Inbound Tourism
We previously mentioned that a possible reason why mobile phone and internet usage may show an increase in life expectancy is because access to these technologies may translate to economic stability. To gain a better understanding of how mobile phone and internet usage may affect the economy, we wanted to explore if there is a relationship between mobile phone usage and tourism inbound. We have good reason to believe there is a relationship between these variables due to the fact that tourists frequently check their phones to look up maps, places to eat food, and common tourist attractions. Aside from using their phones for maps or reviews, tourists may feel even more inclined to use their mobile phones if they are in a country that speaks a different language from their own, in which they would need access to a translator of some sort, and using a translating app on your phone is much more cost-effective, and potentially more comfortable, than hiring a translator to follow you throughout your trip. In Figure 3, we have displayed an interactive visualization which shows mobile phone usage and tourism inbound between the years 2000 and 2012 which helps portray how these variables might be related. Further research on how smartphones influence travel journeys across the world conducted by Google showed that from the nine regions they explored, about 52 percent of people use their smartphones for travel plans (2018). The trends observed might also suggest that an increase in mobile phone and internet usage within a country helps promote more excitement and desire for others to travel to that country. For example, if more Americans or tourists visiting America constantly post about great excursions or sights to see, this information could spread to regions around the world and motivate or encourage them to visit the United States, increasing inbound tourism amounts and subsequently increasing mobile phone and internet usages.
The visualizations we’ve included show the changes overtime, represented by line length and orientation, which are attributes that we can perceive quantitatively (Few 2019, pp. 4–5). The differences in line steepness helps us quickly understand and register quantitative increases over time, with relatively good precision. We decided to limit the view of each graph to one country at a time in order to see and compare the relationship between mobile phone usage and tourism inbound over time more clearly, instead of viewing a cluttered list or grid of all countries at once, which would make it difficult when trying to compare each country’s mobile phone or internet usages to each country’s tourism inbound quantities. This helps reduce the amount of cognitive load required to interpret the visualizations by limiting the number of “comparisons that we can make in any one moment” which is important to consider because “working memory can only handle three or at most four variables at a time” (Few 2019, pp. 6–7). This is also an example of filtering data, “as analysts rarely visualize the entirety of a data set at once” because it is much easier to analyze large amounts of data by “[shifting] their focus among different data subsets” (Heer 2012, p. 4). Though seeing the bigger picture of a dataset may be useful at times, by organizing the data into smaller subsets, we can focus on specific values and trends to analyze and compare them in a more meaningful way.
Conclusion
With every variable we observed, we have seen how mobile phone and internet usage plays a big role in our day-to-day lives. With each social media post, Google search, or instant message we make through our smartphones, we contribute to the growing total of mobile phone and internet usage. This growing total contributes to the increase of inbound tourism and life expectancy, especially in developing countries. Inbound tourism leads to more infrastructure improvements as well as economic growth for the country and subsequently, an increase in life quality as seen in the female life expectancy average. Browsing social media or using the internet may just seem like a way to pass the time, but it actually has an impact on the rest of the world. It’s interesting to think about how the data might change due to the Covid-19 pandemic. As countries increased travel restrictions and emphasized stay-at-home orders, inbound tourism numbers should have decreased dramatically while mobile phone and internet usage should have surged. Regardless of the effect Covid-19 had on the life expectancy and tourism inbound portions of the dataset, it wouldn’t have changed the fact that mobile phones and the internet continue to become more deeply ingrained in our lives, and in fact, it may have made it more apparent.
Works Cited
Few, S. (2019, September). Visual Business Intelligence — The Perceptual and Cognitive Limits of Multivariate Data Visualization. https://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=2957.
Heer, J., & Shneiderman, B. (2012). Interactive Dynamics for Visual Analysis. Queue, 10(2), 30–55. https://doi.org/10.1145/2133416.2146416
How smartphones influence the entire travel journey in the U.S. and abroad. (2018, February). Google. https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/consumer-insights/consumer-journey/consumer-travel-smartphone-usage/.
Lee, Cheng-Wen, and Min-Sun Kim. “Internationalisation and Risk: Literature Review, Integrative Framework and Research Agenda.” International Business Review, vol. 8, no. 2, 30 June 2020, buscompress.com/uploads/3/4/9/8/34980536/riber_8–2_06_m18–053_70–80.pdf.
Mobile Fact Sheet. (2021, April 26). Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/
Ray, A. (2015, January 22). The History and Evolution of Cell Phones. https://www.artinstitutes.edu/about/blog/the-history-and-evolution-of-cell-phones.
