Messengers in the urban environment: Hybrid forms and new practices

Abstract

Mobility is one of the main tendencies in media development in recent several years. But the results and the process itself remain unclear. What features of users' practices are transformed and how does this infuence new services' advent and transformations? We suppose that one of the main signs of mobility increase is the expansion of messengers. New technologies appear to our everyday life with such processes as synchrony, intimacy transformation, the defnitive erasure of borders between online and offine. We offer an analysis of these technologies in comparison with social network sites and a review of primary tendencies in the spread of messengers.