Literature Review
Mobile Phone Usage and Features
Modern phones have a variety of features that simply were not possible years ago: Mobile phones are not just for voice communication anymore (Ishii, 2006). College students can access the Internet, send or receive text messages, check email, and even video chat with others quite literally from the palm of their hand. In addition, students can access a variety of social network sites (SNS) from their mobile phones. Scholars boyd and Ellison (2008) explain that SNS are online services that allow people to create a profile, create a list of other users who share a connection with the user, and view the lists of connections created by others within that system. For the purposes of the current study, we use the technical term SNS in place of other terminology (e.g., social networking sites) because SNS better conveys the way in which users communicate with others via these systems. boyd and Ellison note that other terms, like social networking sites, emphasize relationship initiation and users forming connections with others with whom they might not normally have come in contact. However, the term SNS better conveys the way in which users communicate with other people they have connected with. As boyd and Ellison put it, ‘‘They are