What we do in the shadows: The consumption of mobile messaging by social media mobile apps in the twilight of the social networking era

The most significant change in mobile and social media has happened under our noses: the vampiric consumption of old-fashioned texting by social media mobile apps. Mobile messaging apps are among the most downloaded and used apps on earth (Statistica, 2022). For many people, mobile messaging is synonymous with Facebook and WhatsApp. Outside China, where WeChat dominates, over 2.5 billion people use these two Meta platforms for mobile messaging, and the company owns 90% of the mobile messaging market share in many places. This undercounts mobile messaging because Apple's iMessage likely exceeds Facebook's mobile messager app in size, and the Android messaging program is similar in size to Snapchat, Telegram, and QQ (the fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-ranked mobile messager apps respectively) (Statistica, 2022). Whatever you call it—texting, mobile instant messaging, direct messaging (DM), mobile chat—mobile messaging is, and long has been, an enormous part of the experience of mobile media. In this article, I will focus on messaging that occurs on mobile devices exclusively (i.e., smartphones), not desktop- or laptop-accessed messenger programs.

In the last five years, the boundaries between social media use (SMU) and mobile messaging have utterly blurred. Although Facebook introduced the DM in 2011, it wasn’t fully integrated with mobile devices until 2017 (Business of Apps, 2022). Earlier versions of social media messaging were bound to the platform, seldom used, and forgettable. Only in competition with WhatsApp and Snapchat and the rapid adoption of the smartphone did mobile messaging become a priority for social network sites. Facebook “solved” this problem in 2014 by acquiring WhatsApp for what was—at the time—the largest acquisition to date (Business of Apps, 2022). When people think of mobile messaging, they think of social media companies’ mobile apps.

This means the notoriously fiendish problem of defining SMU just got more fiendish. Studies with SMU data collected as recently as 2018 measured something different from what was measured in the last five years. Like a vampire, social media apps are draining the essence of texting. The research implications of this are huge.

What are you talking about? Wait, what are you talking about?

I often talk to journalists and podcasters about the intersection of offline and online communication in the context of relationships. There is a significant disconnect between what I am thinking of when I talk about social media and what they are thinking of. Perhaps they are looking through a particular lens based upon their age and platform preference (i.e., late Millennial and Twitter). When they hear social media, they are often thinking of consuming political and entertainment content, created by people who are (sort of) famous and who are highly active on social media. To many people, this is social media.

Others disagree. A recent study (Pouwels et al., 2021) focusing on Snapchat, Instagram, and WhatsApp, found that, on average, Dutch adolescents spent 16 minutes of the last hour composing and reading private chat messages and about 6 minutes consuming public social media content. This means mobile messaging takes up between 2.5 to 3 times as much time as consumptive use! For this population, private chatting is social media use.

Furthermore, this change is happening at the twilight of the social networking era. Very soon, algorithms, rather than user-selected social networks, will determine what we see on social media. These changes will feed two swiftly swelling tributaries of SMU. One stream of social media is filling with algorithm-selected entertainment, presented in short snippets (e.g., TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, a retooled Facebook). Among teens and tweens, increases in screen time from 2019 to 2021 doubled the prior four years combined (Rideout et al., 2022). This dramatic increase was largely due to an increase in online video streaming. The second swelling tributary is mobile messaging integrated into mobile devices through social media apps. We, researchers, bemoan the fact that the exact same term—social media—is used to describe elements like the private message, the profile, the network, and the stream (Bayer et al., 2020). When algorithm-generated content and private messages become the dominant forms of use, will we learn from our past mistakes and make better distinctions?

We have the active-versus-passive dichotomy, don’t we?

The passive-versus-active dichotomy is one of the longest-standing and most useful SMU research distinctions. Traditionally, active use includes public SMU (posting and commenting on others’ posts) and private SMU (the DM), while passive use is everything else—often a stand-in for general screen time (Meier & Krause, 2022). Meta-analyses and substantiative reviews have reinforced this dichotomy's importance: passive use is weakly but negatively associated with well-being, while active use is weakly but positively associated with well-being (Valkenberg, 2021).

The rise of mobile messaging means the nature of active SMU has changed: it is now nearly exclusively messaging. A recent investigation of public and private SMU (Pouwels et al., 2021) concluded that active public use was so rare as to be unable to be studied. Active use was always a small portion of total social networking time, rendered even smaller once messaging was removed from the equation (Hall, 2018). When research conducted before 2018 refers to active use, it is likely referring to public posting, one-click responding, and commenting, which is quite different than estimates of SMU dominated by messaging. This may become smaller and smaller, or reserved for certain platforms or their sub-components (e.g., stories).

Even if we give a “thumbs up” to the active/passive conceptualization, it may have outdated its usefulness. Let's call active SMU what it really is, interactive messaging. One cannot engage in active private SMU without a responsive partner. When both partners are responsive, it is a social interaction (Hall, 2018). Consider the fact that there is a ∼.93 correlation between time spent sending and receiving private social media messages (Pouwels et al., 2021). They are essentially the same thing. I agree with Meier and Krause (2022) who argue that “private SMU is essentially interpersonal communication (i.e., a constant back-and-forth of messages), making the active/passive dichotomy artificial and obsolete” (p. 13).

Mobile messaging and relationships

Studying mobile messaging as interpersonal communication invites new questions. It changes the who and the what of SMU. Messaging has long been reserved for closer friends and family members, essential for keeping in touch and staying informed about each other's plans (Hall & Baym, 2012). In my analysis of 4,434 interactions of 243 people from 2015 and 2018, interactive messaging occurred mainly with friends and family, rarely with acquaintances, and not at all (0%) with strangers (Hall, 2020). In a quota sample of Americans in 2021, texting was the most popular modality for keeping in touch with close relationship partners (Hall, Dominguez, et al., in press). Among Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z, texting was used to communicate in ∼90% of all relationships. This percentage dropped a little among Boomers and the Greatest Generation, yet even they preferred texting over all modalities except phone calls.

People use texting to do many important things, from planning to joking around, from self-disclosing to sexting. Because it is done in the shadows, it probably has distinct effects on relationships. Private DMs have distinct purposes and functions, partly because they are private (Ling & Lai, 2016). Utz (2015) found that self-disclosure through social media is associated with more intimacy and stronger feelings of connection, but only for private, directed messages, not for public posts and updates.

What's the value of messaging?

Mobile messaging is a durable, important, and distinct mode of communication. Yet we don’t know much about its value. A recent meta-analysis found texting frequency is weakly associated with global well-being (k  =  9, r  =  .10) (Liu et al., 2019). The authors note, however, that this association may be inflated because texting is reserved for close partners. Another large study using momentary assessments of college students’ interactions found text-based online interactions were associated with greater well-being than being alone, but were less beneficial than richer media channels and in-person interactions (Kroencke et al., in press). We (Hall, Pennington, et al., in press) have also found that texting is less likely to satisfy the need to belong than other modalities of communication.

The consequences of frequent texting are likely mixed. My first study on mobile media (Hall & Baym, 2012) found there were both costs and benefits of texting between friends. The feelings of guilt to respond and be available to others was one of the costs, made worse when individuals tried to maintain more relationships with less close partners (Hall, 2017). This both-and tension arose again in my work on digital stress. With data collected among adolescents and young adults in 2019 and 2020, we (Hall, Miller, et al., 2021) found that the association between well-being and SMU (measured using Apple Screen Time, including iMessage and mobile messaging apps) was mediated by connection overload. Individuals with more SMU had stronger peer relationships, but felt the burden of keeping in touch. Texting is not a simple force for ill or gain; the very messages, notifications, and pick-ups that allow the user to enjoy a meme, a message, or a photo sent from friends also contribute to feeling overwhelmed and exhausted by the volume of information (see also Ling & Lai, 2016).

The value of mobile messaging depends on the quality of relationships and the message content. By itself, there is mixed evidence as to whether messaging is a boon to relationships (Pouwels et al., 2021; Sharabi et al., 2019; Utz, 2015). Data we (Hall, Pennington, et al., 2021b) collected during the pandemic suggests that its frequency, controlling for other forms of mediated communication, had no association with well-being. For mobile messaging, content matters. When people are talking about work or school, mobile messaging is no better or worse than in-person or voice-call conversations in terms of feelings of momentary connection and less loneliness (Hall, 2020). When people were joking around with each other, however, they benefited more when they were in-person or talking on the phone.

Whatever the benefits of messaging, they almost certainly come with costs. Maybe telling people to mobile message close friends and family more often will improve their well-being, but maybe not. Focusing on the need to belong, we (Hall, Pennington, et al., in press) found that texting might be valuable for those who feel the most disconnected and is better than having no social interactions at all. Yet blindly recommending “active” SMU is counter-productive in the environment where you need a responsive communication partner for an important conversation and lack access to someone who truly cares.

What is the value of SMU without messaging?

I’m not sure that we know the answer, but it isn’t because of a lack of research. There are 15 times as many studies that focus on SMU and global well-being than studies on texting (Liu et al., 2019). Recent studies are fraught because time or frequency measures of SMU are probably measuring a lot of mobile messaging.

Separating the elements of SMU is crucial (Bayer et al., 2020). In my work with Natalie Pennington (Pennington & Hall, 2021), we found that Facebook communication did not increase relational closeness with old friends and other weak ties over time, nor did it prevent decline of the relationship. Instead, people followed, commented/liked, and DM’d the old friends they were already close to. This has implications for well-being. A recent experiment suggests that patterns of use influence the effects of taking a social media break (Hanley et al., 2019). People who post, upload pictures, comment on others’ posts and pictures, and privately DM each other through Instagram and Facebook have the most to lose by abstaining from social media. People who primarily scroll and browse have the most to gain from abstaining.

There is more to learn about these discrete features of social media in light of the consumption of texting by social media mobile apps. We could ask whether there are any distinct benefits associated with the link among these apps, social network site profiles, and the social media stream. Social media profiles are a living and durable address book, surpassing the phone number, email, and postal address in access and longevity (Standlee, 2019). Thus, some people you can only reach via social media DMs. In recruiting participants for a social media abstinence study, I discovered many potential recruits were unwilling to lose their mobile messenger access if they quit social media. But does that matter in any meaningful sense for well-being or relationships or is it merely a convenient feature? Are there distinct effects due to other places of overlap between the social media stream and private messaging? Memes and TikToks sent through messaging channels or other platform features intrigue me. When users send one another memetic content, is it the same as a written message? Is it an act of relationship maintenance? Once we better differentiate between forms of mobile media use and acknowledge the centrality of messaging, exciting questions await.

Conclusions

As Bayer et al. (2020) claimed: “Messaging is now the social backbone of many social media platforms” (p. 476). I find it incredible that the public (and many researchers) are so comfortable condemning SMU wholesale, given how important texting is to so many people across the world and across generations. Again, this may be due to the confusion about what social media is. Yet it is also something that researchers can and should be more responsible for clarifying. So, my plea to my fellow researchers is:

Stop measuring SMU without considering what people are doing when they use it. Be more attentive to the fact that, like a vampire, the very life of social media is sustained by mobile messaging. Whether you come from an affordance perspective, a mobile media perspective, or from a mass-personal perspective, we should better distinguish the messaging processes from SMU as an amorphous whole.