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A large scale study of text-messaging use

Published: 07 September 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Text messaging has become a popular form of communication with mobile phones worldwide. We present findings from a large scale text messaging study of 70 university students in the United States. We collected almost 60, 000 text messages over a period of 4 months using a custom logging tool on our participants' phones. Our re- sults suggest that students communicate with a large number of contacts for extended periods of time, engage in simultaneous conversations with as many as 9 contacts, and often use text messaging as a method to switch between a variety of communication mediums. We also explore the content of text messages, and ways text message habits have changed over the last decade as it has become more popular. Finally, we offer design suggestions for future mobile communication tools.

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    MobileHCI '10: Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Human computer interaction with mobile devices and services
    September 2010
    552 pages
    ISBN:9781605588353
    DOI:10.1145/1851600
    • General Chairs:
    • Marco de Sá,
    • Luís Carriço,
    • Program Chair:
    • Nuno Correia
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 07 September 2010

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    Author Tags

    1. large-scale study
    2. mobile device
    3. short message service
    4. sms
    5. text messaging
    6. texting

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    MobileHCI '10 Paper Acceptance Rate 46 of 225 submissions, 20%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 202 of 906 submissions, 22%

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    Cited By

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    • (2024)The elephant in the zoom: will psychoanalysis survive the screen?The American Journal of Psychoanalysis10.1057/s11231-024-09457-784:2(203-228)Online publication date: 12-Jun-2024
    • (2023)GlassMessagingProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/36109317:3(1-32)Online publication date: 27-Sep-2023
    • (2023)GlassMessaging: Supporting Messaging Needs During Daily Activities Using OST-HMDsProceedings of the 2023 ACM Symposium on Spatial User Interaction10.1145/3607822.3618016(1-3)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2023
    • (2023)Effect of Context on Smartphone Users’ Typing Performance in the WildACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/357701330:3(1-44)Online publication date: 10-Jun-2023
    • (2023)What makes IM users (un)responsive: An empirical investigation for understanding IM responsivenessInternational Journal of Human-Computer Studies10.1016/j.ijhcs.2022.102983172(102983)Online publication date: Apr-2023
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    • (2022)Jettisoning Junk Messaging in the Era of End-to-End Encryption: A Case Study of WhatsAppProceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202210.1145/3485447.3512130(2582-2591)Online publication date: 25-Apr-2022
    • (2022)Using Psychophysics to Guide Power Adaptation for Input Methods on Mobile Architectures2022 IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA)10.1109/HPCA53966.2022.00045(514-527)Online publication date: Apr-2022
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