Between Post-Flâneur and Smartphone Zombie: Smartphone Users’ Altering Visual Attention and Walking Behavior in Public Space

Gorsev Argin,Burak Pak,Handan Turkoglu

doi:10.3390/ijgi9120700

Abstract

The extensive use of smartphones in our everyday lives has created new modes of appropriation and behavior in public spaces. Recognition of these are essential for urban design and planning practices which help us to improve the relationship between humans, technologies, and urban environment. This study aims to research smartphone users in public space by observing their altering visual attention and walking behavior, and, in this way, to reveal the emergent “new figures”. For this purpose, Korenmarkt square in Ghent, Belgium, was observed for seven days in 10-min time intervals. The gaze and walking behavior of smartphone users were encoded as geo-located and temporal data, analyzed and mapped using statistical and spatial analysis methods. Developing and implementing new methods for identifying the characteristics of smartphone users, this study resulted in a nuanced characterization of novel spatial appropriations. The findings led to a better understanding and knowledge of the different behavior patterns of emergent figures such as “post-flâneurs” and “smartphone zombies” while uncovering their altering visual interactions with and movements in the public space. The results evoked questions on how researchers and designers can make use of spatial analysis methods and rethink the public space of the future as a hybrid construct integrating the virtual and the physical.

Highlights

The rapidly altering nature of public place and its significance in our everyday lives has been one of the most compelling queries in urban studies, beginning with the dominance of the private over public life [1]
This study aimed to understand the visual engagement of smartphone users with the physical public space by examining their altering gaze and movement and identifying new figures among them
We carried out a natural observational study in which we observed a public space in the city center of Ghent, Belgium, for seven days in 10-min time intervals and analyzed 350 smartphone users among the passers-by

Summary

Introduction

The rapidly altering nature of public place and its significance in our everyday lives has been one of the most compelling queries in urban studies, beginning with the dominance of the private over public life [1]. With the introduction of mobile modes of ICTs (mICTs), people began carrying this virtual space along with them into the public space and leading to the emergence of “hybrid space” [4,5,6,7], which has been used to define a variety of multi-layered constructions of space in the literature. When it comes to the mICTs, hybrid space is used to describe mainly two kinds of juxtapositions of dualities: private–public [4,5,6] and virtual–physical [7]. New spontaneous and non-traditional appropriations and behaviors in public spaces emerge as people interact with mobile technologies, leading to a gradual transformation of public spaces so as to accommodate these new behaviors [9] and raising a query about the hybrid public space of tomorrow

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