News in their Pockets: A Cross-City Comparative Study of Mobile News Consumption in Asia

This book explores the societal, technological, and user-related factors in understanding why and how digitally savvy college students in Asia’s most mobile cities—Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taipei—seek news via the mobile phone, how they evaluate mobile news for credibility and usefulness, and the consequences of this practice: becoming engaged with mobile news, which then teaches them about current affairs. The analyses are situated at the intersection of technological advances from 3G to 4G and marked differences in political and media systems across the four cities, which jointly shape Asia’s new generations of citizens. Technologically, the deeply diffused mobile phone motivates civic-minded millennials and centennials in Asia to access news with their phones and engage with the news for civic learning. However, sociopolitical factors impede potential positive outcomes of mobile news consumption. Cross-societal comparisons of survey data collected from two time periods reveal new insights into the interplay of technology and society in consuming mobile news.