Potential effects of ICT on face-to-face meeting opportunities: a GIS-based time-geographic approach

People in modern societies are increasingly experiencing the impacts of information and communication technologies (ICT) on their daily activities and their interactions with other people. These changing activity and interaction patterns due to the use of ICT have important implications to human activity and travel patterns. There are scant studies offering a spatiotemporal analytical framework that can help researchers examine the interactions between ICT and human activities at the individual level. Time geography offers a useful approach of studying individual activities and human interactions in a space-and-time context. By extending a time-geographic analytical framework, this study uses an example of arranging a face-to-face (F2F) meeting between two people to illustrate how potential F2F meeting opportunities can be impacted under four different scenarios of phone access levels. This spatiotemporal analytical framework and the various phone access scenarios are implemented in a space–time geographic information system (GIS) to demonstrate the feasibility of this analytical framework. In addition, this time-geographic framework offers analysis functions in support of quantitative assessments of ICT’s impacts on human activities.

Research highlights
► An extended time-geography framework modeling both physical and virtual spaces.
► A method to assess the impact of phone usage on potential F2F meeting space.
► A space-time GIS-based prototype that implements the framework and the method.