Authors: Thulin, E., Vilhelmson, B., & Schwanen, T.
Overview
This article explores how the mobile online presence facilitated by smartphones reshapes human spatial practices, encompassing people’s daily routines and experiences in time and space. It challenges the prevalent notion of the autonomy and flexibility associated with ubiquitous use of social media, instead highlighting new constraints on user agency. Drawing on time-geographic theory, the study offers fresh insights into the virtual dimensions of young people’s social lives and their manifestation in the physical realm. It reevaluates traditional time-geographic concepts such as bundling, constraints, rhythms, and pockets of local order, while leveraging the growing body of literature on smartphone usage and incorporating illustrative examples from interviews with young individuals. The analysis reveals significant changes in everyday life and social dynamics driven by the pervasive and constant mediated presence of social connections. These include the emergence of new coupling constraints and the reconceptualization of social interaction, shifts in the rhythms of social engagement due to increased frequency and intensity of mediated social activities, alterations in the nature of online contacts that actively intervene in and influence ongoing activities, and the restructuring of foreground activities and co-located as well as mediated presences, marked by interweaving processes, congestion, ambivalence, and co-located absence.
Key themes include intervening background, local and mediated pockets of order, online co-presence, rhythm, and spatial practice.
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