Mobile Communications, Social Networks, and Urban Travel: Hypertext as a New Metaphor for Conceptualizing Spatial Interaction∗

∗This article is based on the Fleming Lecture in Transportation Geography I delivered at the 102th Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Chicago, 7–11 March 2006. I thank Jean-Paul Rodrigue for making arrangements for the lecture, and the Department of Geography at the University of Washington for providing support to me for this lecture. I am also grateful to the audience, to Bill Black (who served as the discussant of the session), and to three anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments. The views expressed in this article remain my responsibility.

Abstract

The widespread use of mobile communications is leading to new practices in family life and social life, and these changes have significant implications for the study of urban travel. Because of the adoption of new modes of space-time coordination, changing time use and increasing mobility, changing use of existing urban nodes, the blurring of boundaries between home and work, the importance of social networks and social capital, and the shift to person-to-person connectivity, the spatial structure and processes of interaction among individuals have become much more complicated in this age of mobile communications. Static spatial frameworks based on fixed points (e.g., home or workplace) and distances among them are no longer adequate for understanding urban travel. The study of urban travel now needs new conceptualizations and new methodologies.

∗This article is based on the Fleming Lecture in Transportation Geography I delivered at the 102th Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Chicago, 7–11 March 2006. I thank Jean-Paul Rodrigue for making arrangements for the lecture, and the Department of Geography at the University of Washington for providing support to me for this lecture. I am also grateful to the audience, to Bill Black (who served as the discussant of the session), and to three anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments. The views expressed in this article remain my responsibility.

Key Words:

• activity patterns
• mobile communications
• social networks
• spatial interaction
• urban travel

Notes

∗This article is based on the Fleming Lecture in Transportation Geography I delivered at the 102th Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Chicago, 7–11 March 2006. I thank Jean-Paul Rodrigue for making arrangements for the lecture, and the Department of Geography at the University of Washington for providing support to me for this lecture. I am also grateful to the audience, to Bill Black (who served as the discussant of the session), and to three anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments. The views expressed in this article remain my responsibility.

¹Using handheld mobile phones while driving, however, is prohibited by law in some countries because of safety issues (e.g., the United Kingdom). The use of hands-free mobile phones is allowed in some of these countries, but in others the use of any types of mobile phone while driving is banned. The extent to which we can spend the time otherwise wasted in a traffic jam for work or for performing other activities therefore depends on the extent to which such use is allowed or restricted by law in the country or region in question.

²Less-pronounced rush-hour peaks may be due to other factors such as greater use of flexitime, staggered work hours, and a smaller proportion of the population in the workforce, but de Gournay (2002) is referring to a trend related to the increasing mobility and adoption of mobile phones by young people and women. In light of the data on the actual mobility of mobile phone users in France, which show that the daily distance traveled has barely increased but the trips occur more evenly throughout the day, the reasons for less-pronounced rush-hour peaks in France seems to be more a consequence of a significant increase in nonwork trips that are more evenly spread throughout the day than of a temporal redistribution of the commute trips of full-time or part-time workers.

³This observation is corroborated by my recent study, which shows that women's Internet use tends to reinforce their traditional gender roles and perpetuate existing gender division of household labor (Kwan 2003; Schwanen and Kwan, forthcoming).

⁴In his argument regarding the shift from place-to-place to person-to-person connectivity and from interhousehold to interpersonal networks in the age of mobile communications, Barry Wellman (2001, 238) uses the word “place” to refer to sites typically occupied by many persons: households with many members or worksites with many coworkers. He therefore obfuscates the analytical distinction between places and households. His argument should be more accurately recast as a shift from interhousehold or home-work connectivity to interpersonal connectivity.

⁵The metaphor of hypertext proposed here is based more on notions in social network analysis than on other conceptualizations of networks (e.g., that of actor-network theory developed by Bruno Latour and others; see Latour 1987; Latour and Woolgar 1986). It focuses mainly on personal networks (and therefore ignores nonhuman actors) and on analysis of the topological structure of social networks. Although important differences exist between social network analysis and actor-network theory, the hypertext model can be elaborated and situated in the more comprehensive framework of actor-network theory.