How do people use media technologies in everyday life and how do they make sense of them? This is one of the core questions in media and communication studies, gaining even more in relevance in light of the rapidly changing, convergent media environment. Yet, rich and context-sensitive data about media and technology use are difficult to generate when media consumption is increasingly pervasive, ubiquitous, and often goes on in passing. At the same time, the full potential of smartphones in qualitative research has not yet been realized. The mobile instant messaging interview (MIMI) introduced and assessed in this paper is intended to fill this gap by exploiting some of the unique communication and multimedia features offered by mobile instant messaging apps. Drawing on diary techniques and on the tried and tested mobile experience sampling method (MESM), the MIMI uses WhatsApp for an in situ exploration of distinct settings and situations of social action (e.g., media usage). To substantiate the approach, the results of a pilot study conducted with young smartphone users are presented, discussing the advantages and drawbacks of mobile instant messaging interviews in detail, from the researcher’s as well as the participant’s point of view.

Researching people in their chaotic and complex everyday lives is challenging for researchers at any time but especially during the application of social distancing measures. In this article, we make the case for the methodical potential of mobile messengers such as WhatsApp for qualitative mobile in situ research. We exemplify the productive use of the Mobile Instant Messaging Interview (MIMI), a research method developed by Kaufmann and Peil in 2020, to study participants’ everyday life in real-time. Based on two case studies from geography and communication studies conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, we expound our experiences in the practical application of the MIMI approach and give recommendations. We conclude that MIMIs are a low-cost, easily feasible and short-term implemented approach for research interests across disciplines and possessing great potential for exceptional circumstances like the COVID-19 pandemic. They allow direct access to the practices and experiences of people in situ and in real-time that would otherwise stay hidden and inaccessible to social sciences. The method is suitable for research projects of any size, and can be applied as part of multi- and mixed methods designs and as well for longitudinal designs. Nonetheless, the MIMIs have to be well prepared, demand smart ways of nudging participants into elaborating their responses and require careful coordination between larger teams of researchers.

This introductory chapter explains that there is a widely shared understanding of the imperative nature of media convergence, which is based on different notions connecting positive goals such as efficiency, synergy, simplification, information abundance, participation, availability and multimodality. These social imaginaries of media convergence are powerful concepts that influence political agendas and legitimize policy decisions. In this book, these privileged meanings of media convergence are challenged by presenting alternative and mostly overlooked trends and theories defined under the umbrella term of media deconvergence. The perspective of deconvergence helps to shed light on sites of tension and the simultaneity of competing forces such as coalescence and drifting apart, or linearity and discontinuity. Two of these sites of tension are analyzed more carefully in this chapter: the user’s perspective and the (de)convergence of markets.

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