Smartphones: the nervous system of liquid communication

Abstract

The use of new mobile technologies has become a global phenomenon. There is “a global mobile youth culture” and an “emergency of the sociability in a network” (Castells et al., 2009: 183-184). This study main goal is to understand the mobile phone use by the millennials, and inherent gratifications and social effects generated by the use of such equipment. The research carried out through a mixed methodology that met the quantitative and qualitative research included the analysis of 649 questionnaires applied to young adults and 46 posts obtained from the Facebook webpages of the main telecommunications operators in Portugal. The flow effect among other results revealed by structural equation model, may serve as a warning to the users themselves, parents, companies and schools, which act as educational mediators of language, through new technologies.