The Interrelations Between Virtual and Physical Spaces: The Case of Smartphone Usage Among Adolescents

Abstract

Today’s adolescents are digital natives who have constant access to virtual spaces through their smartphones. Based on a comprehensive literature review, we propose a novel framework of fused spaces for understanding and studying the evolving interrelations between adolescents’ consumption of physical environments and virtual spaces emerging through smartphone use. The framework is evaluated through a smartphone usage survey among 546 adolescents in two distinct neighborhoods in Tel Aviv. Our findings suggest that for adolescents, physical and virtual spaces are highly integrated. Activities in virtual space are extensive and habitual and include multiple types of usage. They can affect and be affected by activities in the physical space, including what we refer to as environmental motivation, the qualities of an environment or situation that can encourage or discourage smartphone usage. Therefore, we conclude that to fully comprehend human spatial behavior today, studies must consider behaviors that occur in both physical and virtual spaces as occurring in one continuance space, a fused space.