WK 6 – Assigment – Use of mobile phone

Day 1  – logging of phone use 

Time period: 7.30 AM – 21.30 PM
Date: 17-9-16
Location: Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Day description; vacation, sightseeing

As I was on I trip to Vietnam for the weekend I decided to keep tracking of my phone use in this situation to see how it might effect my use of phone in a different environment. The data is shown below:

Logging, Mobile use,
Logging, Mobile use,
Logging, Phone Use
Logging, Phone Use

As shown in the pie chart the 3 most common use of my phone was:

  1. Social Media
  2. Map
  3. Information

What is interesting to see through the logging is how the use of my mobile phone changes through out the day. I can see that in the morning a lot of my behavior was related to planning, later finding the way, and in the end of the day relaxing and more use of social medias.

This is also affected by the fact that I didn’t have access to data during the day in Vietnam. I believe that If I did the same kind of logging in Singapore on a week day probably will show another result of my use of phone. This outline how the context affect your behavior.

Reflection on other peoples mobile device behavior:
I chose to see and ask the 2 persons I travelled with during the day what they used their phone for and at what time – Usually it was during our breakes and again also use of social media and news.

Vietnam, Pedestrian, Break, 1 day without phone

Vietnam, Pedestrian, Break, 1 day without phone

What was interesting to see was that I found a lot of Vietnamese people during the day had breakes without using mobile devices but instead socializing with the people around them or just eat without any distractions – I am not sure if this is a fact, but a observation it was.

Day 2  – No use of mobile phone

The first thing I noticed with myself when I thought about which day to do the exercise was that I really felt that I had to plan when I had time to do it. As I am constantly using electronic devices in my every day life I could see it would be a challenge and a drag on my usual work. I decided to do the exercise in Vietnam where It did not affect my every day work life but instead could be a challenge to manoeuvre through my day without my devices.
Below are some of the observations I did after the day ended:

  1. In the breaks throughout the day I felt the time was longer when I was in company with other people who use their phones.
  2. As expected I was more aware of my surroundings on buses, at the hostel, at cafés when I did not have access to my phone
  3. When being in a travel group, suddenly some of our unspoken rutines (I was usually the person who directed the way) changed.
  4. Valuta Calculation and information needed to be found elsewhere or calculated roughly without devices.
  5. When I had access to my phone again, I suddently had a lot of people I needed to reply, mails to be deleted and etc. It could interesting to see in the future If it is actually more time consuming/ not needed to  stay in contact all the time and also checking emails frequently rather than decide specific times at day to do these activities (Think I read an article about this topic once)

In general the exercise showed how much I actually depend on my phone use, but on the same time it was a refreshing exercise to break with some of my daily rutines and do things in other ways!