ABSTRACT
Our world is becoming increasingly connected through mobile digital technologies. As of June 2014, Internet World Stats estimated that around 87% of the North American population and around 70% of the European population is connected in some way to the web. Outside of these regions the numbers are smaller but rapidly growing: Internet usage in Africa has grown by close to 6,000% over the past 15 years, while Internet usage in other regions has shown similar growth ranging from over 1,600% in Latin America to over 3,000% in the Middle East (Internet World Stats, 2014). In mid-2014, mobile devices replaced desktop and laptop computers as the single most common method to access the Web in the United States (Perez, 2014). Of additional interest, Cisco (2015) predicts that by 2019, 89% of mobile devices in North America will be smart devices, defined as “having advanced computing and multimedia capabilities with a minimum of 3G connectivity” (p. 8). Likewise by 2019, 70% of Europe’s mobile devices will be smart, 61% in Latin America, 56% in the Asia Pacific region, and 41% in the Middle East and Africa (Cisco, 2015). This shift away from the tethered connections afforded by laptops and PCs toward untethered connections afforded by low-footprint smart devices (Horowitz, 2010) is accompanied by advances in data collection capabilities which enable multimodal and real-time sharing of information (Uti & Fox, 2010).
