Sharing, Communication, and Music Listening: A Diary Study of Technology Use by Pre-Teens and Adolescents

Michael Stewart | tgm@vt.edu | hcientist.com Virginia Tech Center for Human-Computer Interaction
SHARING, COMMUNICATION,
AND MUSIC LISTENING:
A DIARY STUDY OF TECHNOLOGY USE BY PRE-TEENS AND
ADOLESCENTS
Michael Stewart
tgm@vt.edu
hcientist.com
Deborah Tatar Steve Harrison
1

Kids want
connection
“Relatedness” is a human
need10

They send ~60 texts/day24

They listen to music to
connect with peers and
socialize18-23
All You Need is Love: Current Strate
Relationships through Technology
MARC HASSENZAHL, STEPHANIE HEIDECKER
and SARAH DIEFENBACH, Folkwang University of th
UWE HILLMANN, Telekom Innovation Laboratories
A wealth of evidence suggests that love, closeness, and intimac
people’s psychological well-being. Nowadays, however, couples a
there has been a growing and flourishing interest in designing
feeling of relatedness when being separated, beyond the explicit ver
available technologies offer. This article provides a review of 143 p
technologies). Based on this, we present six strategies used by design
experience: Awareness, expressivity, physicalness, gift giving, joint a
those strategies as starting points for the experience-oriented design o
Categories and Subject Descriptors: H.5.m [Information Interfaces a
General Terms: Design, Human Factors, Theory
Additional Key Words and Phrases: Experience design, emotional commu
relatedness, interaction design, review, long-distance relationships
ACM Reference Format:
Hassenzahl, M., Heidecker, S., Eckoldt, K., Diefenbach, S., and Hillmann, U
Current strategies of mediating intimate relationships through technology.
Interact. 19, 4, Article 30 (December 2012), 19 pages.
DOI = 10.1145/2395131.2395137 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2395131.2395137
1. INTRODUCTION
The Beatles’ “All You Need is Love” concisely summarizes at least 6
logical research into human well-being. Love and the general feelin
to significant others are crucial to people’s life satisfaction and happi
[1987], Berscheid and Peplau [1983], Campbell et al. [1976], Freedman
and Schaafsma [2008], Myers [1999]). Consequently, “relatedness” is
psychological theories of human needs. For example, Maslow’s Theory
[Maslow 1954] quotes “love-belongingness” as one of five fundamental ne
Cognitive-Experiential Self Theory [Epstein 1990] considers “relatedne
four essential needs, and Ryan and Deci’s contemporary Self-Determina
[Ryan and Deci 2000] even places “relatedness” among the top three of hu
Sheldon et al. [2001, p. 339] conceptually defined fulfilled relatedness as t
that you have regular intimate contact with people who care about you ra
Authors’ addresses:
M. Hassenzahl,
Folkwang
University
of the
Arts,
Essen;
marc.hassenzahl@folkwang-uni.de; S. Heidecker, K. Eckoldt, and S. Diefenbach, Experience
Folkwang University of the Arts, Essen; U. Hillmann, Telekom Innovation Laboratories, Berlin.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is
without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage an
copies show this notice on the first page or initial screen of a display along with the full citation. Copy
for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is
mitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, to redistribute to lists, or to use any compo
of this work in other works requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Permission may be reques
from Publications Dept., ACM, Inc., 2 Penn Plaza, Suite 701, New York, NY 10121-0701, USA, fax +1 (2
869-0481, or permissions@acm.org.
c⃝ 2012 ACM 1073-0516/2012/12-ART30 $15.00
DOI 10.1145/2395131.2395137 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2395131.2395137
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, Vol. 19, No. 4, Article 30, P
2

Kids want connection
“Goal-oriented” connection

“phatic communication”

for social interaction rather than to convey
information

51% teens text just to say several times per
day25
Hi!
3

Design Intuition:
Music can provide a sense
of connection
4

Access to music
FROM LIVE AND PUBLIC, TO EITHER, TO NEITHER
5

Accessibility ↑ : ↓ Sociality
As children’s access to music has increased, the
sociality of music listening has decreased.

Now available on relatively in expensive,
portable devices, children have easier access to
music

Children listen to music privately more often
than with others.
6

Kids in our area
Semi-rural

Low/No mobility
7

Questions
Do these kids want to “connect” with friends?

(How) Are they connecting with each other now?

Do these kids have access to music?

Do these kids listen to music?

Do they “connect” with each other using music?
8

Diary Study28-29
not that kind of diary!

asked participants to
respond to the same
questions every day for 14
days
9

Diary Study
5 multiple choice
questions

free text to elaborate
on aﬃrmatives
1. Communicate with friends
outside of school today?
2. How much use tech to
communicate with friends?
3. Listen to music today?
4. Listen with friends?
5. Participate in music
recommendation?
10

Participants
n=19

12 Female

9-15 yo

x̄ =12 yo
Female

37%
Male

63%
Email

32%
SMS

68%
11

Responses by Participant
Response rate overall: 94%

(249 diaries of 266 opportunities)
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
16
7 4 5 6 2 12 9 13 3 8 11 14 15 17 18 19 21 10 16
NumberofResponses
Participant ID
* note: the following slides will maintain this ordering of participants
12

Percentage Days Kept In Touch
* note: the participants are ordered here based on how frequently they made diary entries (least on the left)
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
7 4 5 6 2 12 9 13 3 8 11 14 15 17 18 19 21 10 16
DaysKeptinTouch
Participant ID
13

Category Frequency Example Codes
Shared interest 35
biking, boys, cooking, extracurricular,
photography, tv show
Small talk 31
how doing, miss each other, “random”,
weather, what doing
“Stuﬀ that happened” 22 day, life, school
Currently ongoing 18 going in game, game, fought, race
Plans 15 get together, plans, party
Uni-directional 4 cell phone, travel
What did you talk about?
* from a total of 106 responses
14

Category Frequency Example Codes
Shared interest 35
biking, boys, cooking, extracurricular,
photography, tv show
Small talk 31
how doing, miss each other, “random”,
weather, what doing
Stuﬀ that happened 22 day, life, school
Currently ongoing 18 going in game, game, fought, race
Plans 15 get together, plans, party
Uni-directional 4 cell phone, travel
Phatic Communication
* from a total of 106 responses
15

Percentage Days Listened
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
7 4 5 6 2 12 9 13 3 8 11 14 15 17 18 19 21 10 16
DaysListenedtoMusic
Participant ID
16

Percentage Days Listened
with Friend
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19
DaysListenedtoMusicwithFriend
Participant ID
17

Findings
Most (89%) participants communicated with their
friends outside of school

Most of participants’ talk with their friends can be
categorized as phatic

All participants listen to music

Participants rarely listen to music with their friends

only do so when co-located
18

Remote Co-listening?
perhaps participants would appreciate alternative
support for phatic communication

that involves listening to music
19

Future
Interviews in the lab

Replicate and extend

Design and then discuss tech for co-listening

Sketches

Try-out Colisten prototype in lab

Colisten in the wild
20

References
available in the
paper 658.
[10] M. Hassenzahl, S. Heidecker, K. Eckoldt, S. Diefenbach, and U.
Hillmann, “All You Need is Love: Current Strategies of Mediating
Intimate Relationships Through Technology,” ACM Trans. Comput.
Interact., vol. 19, no. 4, p. 30:1--30:19, Dec. 2012.
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design for remote couples,” in Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on
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[Accessed: 01-Jan-2015].
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[Accessed: 09-Dec-2016].
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and developmental issues of adolescents,” J. Youth Adolesc., vol. 32, no.
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Meeus, “The role of music preferences in early adolescents’ friendship
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[21] D. Boer, R. Fischer, M. Strack, M. H. Bond, E. Lo, and J. Lam, “How
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http://www.pewinternet.org/2012/03/19/teens-smartphones-texting/.
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Phones,” Pew Internet & American Life Project, 2010. [Online].
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them/. [Accessed: 01-Jan-2015].
[26] C. Sense, “The Common Sense Census: Media Use by Tweens and
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[Online]. Available: http://www.pewinternet.org/2009/08/19/teens-and-
mobile-phones-over-the-past-five-years-pew-internet-looks-back/.
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[35] J. S. Lee and D. Tatar, “Sounds of silence: exploring contributions to
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S. Harrison, Media Space 20+ Years of Mediated Life, 1st ed. Springer
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Sharing, Communication, and Music
A Diary Study of Technology Use by Pre-teens and Ado
Michael Stewart, Deborah Tatar, Steve Harrison
Third Lab of the Center for Human-Computer Interaction
Virginia Tech
Blacksburg, VA, USA
{tgm, dtatar, srh}@cs.vt.edu
Abstract— Music-listening on personal devices is arguably the
most wide-spread form of human-computer interaction. Reasons
for this include that small, widely-available, high-capacity devices
offer users high-quality, choice, and mobility. However, they also
offer what could be called, alternatively, either privacy or
isolation. To understand more about the space of people listening
to music and their sociality, we performed a diary study in the
United States of 19 participants aged 9-15 over a two-week
period. Despite their interest in communicating with their friends
and in listening to music, the participants rarely listened to music
with their friends, and they rarely recommended music to- or
received music recommendations from their friends.
Keywords- Coordination and Cooperation Mechanisms;
Collaborative Human-Centered Systems; Contextual & Situation-
based
Collaboration;
Coordination,
Cooperation
and
Collaboration; Cultural Aspects &
Human
Factors in
Collaboration; music; privacy; isolation; teen-agers
I.
INTRODUCTION
In the past 100 years, the predominant situation of listening
to music has moved successively from one of the public, shared
consumption of live production to one of the potentially shared
consumption of recorded or broadcast production to private
consumption. While the increasing levels of privacy and choice
afforded by the personalization of music listening technology
are valuable indeed, they seem to have required that we
sacrifice listening to music together [1].
People listening to music constitute an important population
to the CTS community. Music listening is one of the most
wide-spread of human-computer interactions, but one least
supported by Collaboration Technologies and Systems
phones are prevalent and virtually all cell phon
listening capabilities. People also lis
devices in wide-spread use, s
tablets, and laptops c
necessary to75 m
desirable, as when people use techno
public, “escape from one’s current e
creating a kind of ‘bubble’ in which out
shut out.” [4, page 278].
Despite the prevalence of these devices
the potential they present for design, they
investigated in design-oriented research. Othe
are explored, such as managing and sharing mu
[6] and engineering audio experiences [7],[8]; h
knowledge, [4] is one of the few papers that exp
in the everyday experience of listening to mu
devices or their potential for sociality.
A. Seeking Connection
As currently constructed, music-listening on
devices appears to be a mostly private experience.
technology changes, Human-Computer Interactio
Computer Supported Cooperative Work communitie
discovered (and keep rediscovering) the human desire and
for connectedness to other people, particularly to people
they care about [9]. The need and desire for connectedness
be through direct contact; it can also be through sha
experience, shared meaning, or even shared space. In a revi
of connectedness, Hassenzahl, et al. chose t
“relatedness” as the “label to subsume the d
throughout the literature, such as
love, belonging, closeness
Lottrdige, et al. ex
couples sd21

Thank You!
Audience

Participants

Co-authors

Reviewers

Labmates
22

Sharing, Communication, and Music Listening: A Diary Study of Technology Use by Pre-Teens and Adolescents

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