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- Thulin, Eva, 1974, et al.
(författare)
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Absent Friends? Smartphones, Mediated Presence, and the Recoupling of Online Social Contact in Everyday Life
- 2020
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Ingår i: Annals of the American Association of Geographers. - : Informa UK Limited. - 2469-4452 .- 2469-4460. ; 110:1, s. 166-183
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article contributes to the geographical understanding of how mobile online presence enabled by smartphones transforms human spatial practices; that is, people's everyday routines and experiences in time and space. Contrasting a mainstream discourse concentrating on the autonomy and flexibility of ubiquitous (anywhere, anytime) use of social media, we examine new and mounting constraints on user agency. Building on time-geographic theory, we advance novel insights into the virtualities of young people's social lives and how they are materialized in the physical world. Critically, we rework the classical time-geographic conceptions of bundling, constraints, rhythms, and pockets of local order; draw on the emerging literature on smartphone usage; and use illustrative examples from interviews with young people. We suggest a set of general and profound changes in everyday life and sociality due to pervasive and perpetual mediated presence of friends: (1) the emergence of new coupling constraints and the recoupling of social interaction; (2) the changing rhythms of social interaction due to mediated bundles of sociality becoming more frequent and insistent; (3) the shifting nature of the streaming background of online contacts, which are becoming more active, intervening in, and intruding on ongoing foreground activities of everyday life; and (4) the reordering of foreground activity as well as colocated and mediated presences, centering on processes of interweaving, congestion and ambivalence, and colocated absence. Key Words: intervening background, local and mediated pockets of order, online copresence, rhythm, spatial practice.
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