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The purpose of this paper is to examine the social adoption of the mobile phone by Irish teenagers in city, town and rural settings. It aims to investigate two key areas that have influenced the teenagers' social adoption of the mobile phone: first, the influence of locational and socio‐economic factors on mobile phone usage; second, how the teenagers' adoption of recently emergent Web 2.0 applications (social‐networking web sites and instant messaging services) tends to bring about a re‐positioning of the mobile phone's role as a communications channel.

The paper draws on a social shaping and domestication of media technologies approach, using original empirical data from a survey of teenage respondents and six focus groups.

The findings suggest that the teenagers' relationship to the mobile phone is evolving as newer communications applications emerge. In particular, the technical competencies and media literacies necessary for multi‐model communication are evolving fastest where locational and socio‐economic conditions are most favourable.

Although access to the mobile phone cuts across the strata of society, people's capacity to benefit from it – and from other forms of multi‐modal communication – is not evenly distributed. The paper argues that, despite universal ownership of the technological device among the sample of teenagers, the mobile phone is caught up in wider digital and socio‐economic divides.

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it investigates the relationship between television, its audiences and Twitter around the creation of social TV events. Here it contributes to knowledge by charting usage in relation to different types of programmes and by comparing Twitter to Facebook data. Second, it evaluates the way in which student-led research can be used to conduct audience studies with the help of Twitter.

The research applies a quantitative approach, measuring the volume of Twitter messages before, during and after two different types of television programmes, i.e. Reality TV (The X Factor and The Only Way is Essex) and sports broadcasts (football and Formula One). Brief comparisons are also drawn with data collected from Facebook. The pedagogical evaluation of the research is based on self-reflection by the author/tutor.

The research established similar trends and patterns of viewer engagement for both types of television programming, with key activity during and towards the end of a broadcast which points to viewers using Twitter, or Facebook, while watching the event. The findings are compared to previous studies on television programmes and Twitter use. The study also identified that student research using Twitter can lead to a valuable learning experience as it allows students to use their own knowledge of social media to inform the research process.

This research makes a contribution to the small yet growing body of studies examining Twitter activity in relation to TV events. It also contributes to knowledge on the educational use of social media by providing an account of how Twitter can be applied as a research tool by students.