Main Article Content
Abstract
Smartphone has played a vital role in shaping our modern daily life, including gratifying our needs in entertainment, information search, and social networking. Nowadays, mobile instant messaging (MIM) has been adopted as a main communication tool not only by the younger generations, but also by the older groups. However, most studies have focused on how the young users communicate with their peers, while the middle-aged group has not received any proper attention from researchers. This study aims to examine middle-aged adults’ (40 to 60 years old) use of MIM as a complementing tool of the traditional communication forms to sustain relational involvements with their friends and family members. Applying a snowballing online survey method, this study has asked a group of students of a communication research class of a mid-size private university in Hong Kong to deliver the online questionnaire to their parents, also asked their parents to send the questionnaire to their middle-aged friends who have children. This study finds two major types of MIM functions being used: visual-based and audio-based. These functions are significantly related to three newly found relational gratifications: friendship maintenance, family relations maintenance, and troubleshooting. This study expands the understanding of specific MIM communication patterns among the respondents, also explores the age and gender differences in MIM communication.
Keywords: Mobile instant messaging, relational maintenance gratifications, family relations, middle-aged adults.
Article Details
Copyright (c) 2020 Asian Journal of Media and Communication (AJMC)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).