Abstract
The study analyses daily activities of youth in the virtual and actual environment within the framework of theoretical and applied achievements of time geography. The role of mobile devices in youth life, transformation of traditional activity and changes in the daily organization of actions due to digitalization are discussed. Empirical data for the research were obtained via a diary method (the respondents were 18–22-year-old students). Features of individual daily foreground and background activities, digital devices used, activities relation and localization are evaluated by geovisualization performed within the time-geographical concepts. Regardless of the smartphonization, individuals reserve time spans not associated with virtual activities; their online activities are localized within places of residence, study and traffic routes, while public spaces serve as “live communication” platforms (but a complete rejection of virtual activity does not occur here). An attempt to compare youth daily activity under ordinary conditions and during the period of forced isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic is being made.
Highlights
In the 21st century, it is hard to find a sphere of life not affected by digitalization
Not so long ago it has been widely accepted that technological progress and development of global computer networks results in a decrease in individuals’ physical activity (Kramer 2004). This conviction was based on an assurance that people will spend more time at stationary personal computers (PCs)
The answers of the respondents from our research indicate that students use smartphones in their daily life more often than PCs, favouring a gadget that is capable of serving an exceedingly wide sphere of functions
Summary
In the 21st century, it is hard to find a sphere of life not affected by digitalization. Digitalization is not just a technological process It starts to reformat many socioeconomic systems, affects and often drastically changes traditional models of society functioning. Time-space activity patterns of people change due to modern information and communication technologies (ICT) (Shaw 2009) as they go to a “temporally and spatially fragmented lifestyle” (Ben-Elia et al 2018). These technologies determine more and more how we work, study, buy goods and services, travel, and how we communicate with each other. The expansion of smartphones has provoked people to restructure their everyday life in terms of time and space use (Ling 2012), while modern transport means saturated with additional functions (like access to the Internet) imposed virtual environment on individuals (Ben-Elia et al 2018), etc
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