Spotlight on Mobile Computing: The Mobile Difference

In this interactive session, Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, will discuss the project’s latest findings about how people use mobile devices, including smartphones and tablet computers (iPads). He will describe how mobile connectivity has changed some of the racial and ethnic composition of the online population and shrunken the digital divide. He will also explore how the mobile revolution has combined with the social networking revolution to produce new kinds of learning and sharing environments and how this has changed users’ expectations about the availability of media and information.

Further, he will describe how people’s experience of the Internet is different when people access it on different-sized screens (i.e., small handheld screens versus large desktop screens). And he will consider how the changing media ecosystem is affecting the way people receive, share, and create information.