Smartphone Practice and Lifestyle: The Case of Urban in Iran

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between smartphone practices and lifestyle in urban Iran. Recently, the use of smartphones has dramatically been increased in Iran, and this trend is expected to influence users' lifestyle in the everyday context. Therefore, to test this hypothesis, I follow the notion of “lifestyle" which was advanced by Pierre Bourdieu to offer an analysis of this changing trend. I choose the sample based on purpose sampling and conduct the research through an online survey. The number of participants was 219. The results underscored the research hypothesis, but they also indicated that using a smartphone is not a powerful indicator to explain the lifestyle variance. The Pearson correlation was 0.42, but ANOVA test confirmed that the use of smartphone explains only 0.17 percentage of lifestyle variance. Further analysis showed that other variables like gender, education and age do not have a predicting effect on lifestyle. However, income plays a role.