Mobile Technologies and Youthful Exploration: Stimulus or Inhibitor?

Abstract

In this paper, an examination is made of how young people locate themselves in the world through using GPS-enabled mobile phones. Three research themes are explored. First, how GPS mobile phones encourage young people to explore new territory by providing both spatial information and a ‘lifeline’ to security. Secondly, how parental surveillance encourages or discourages exploration. Finally, how the accessibility of spatial data reduces the need to try new routes or memorise landscape features. In so doing, two myths of mobile phone use are challenged: that the revolution in mobile technology has caused the ‘death of distance’ and created a borderless world through space–time compression and that mobile technologies atomise quotidian life into a series of impersonal mediated encounters. The research, conducted in New Jersey, USA, and Cornwall, UK, shows that mobile phones appear to give young people more confidence in exploring new places, but also distract them from observing their surroundings.

Introduction

This paper explores the creative processes of everyday life whereby young people become (dis)embedded in the social structure of places and how they learn about and use space through mobile technologies. As Pfaff’s (2010) recent review illustrates, research on mobile telephony has mushroomed almost as fast as the adoption of the technology itself. Young people own many of the four billion mobile phones currently in use and investigations into how this technology is changing young people’s behaviour, social relationships, attention spans, time expenditure and privacy are on-going. Carr (2010) is among pessimists who argue that the Internet and other communication technologies are producing a culture with short attention spans to the detriment of deep thought. Powers (2010) hypothesises that our addiction to checking our digital screens is programmed by our evolutionary need to respond rapidly to predators or prey, at the expense of connecting family, books and thought (for a discussion on nostalgia for the unconnected life, see Shteyngart, 2010). Vigdor and Ladd (2010) present evidence that providing universal access to home computers and high speed Internet would broaden, rather than narrow, gaps in children’s maths and reading achievement. Numerous similar and countervailing studies show the costs and benefits to mental agility and accumulation of knowledge which advances in IT have brought. Similarly, there are both proponents of the significant educational advantages of mobile phones (for example, Prensky, 2005–06) and opponents who advocate the banning of phones in schools.

Previous research on young people and mobile phones has focused on their role in relationship formation and socialisation (for example, Katz, 2006; Thompson and Cupples, 2008; Lenhart et al., 2010; Bond, 2011). Guvi (2007, p. 11) investigated teenagers’ use of mobiles in South Africa and found, inter alia, that virtual contact facilitated interaction in physical (public) spaces but that one result “may be the re-emergence of racial boundaries as they organize to meet in physical spaces”. Guvi also suggested that teenagers are more adept at maintaining social relationships virtually than in physical space; mobiles may reduce the need or desire to explore spatially for social motives (see also Tutt, 2005). Responding to the widely held view that mobility among 10–13-year-olds in Denmark was restricted compared with previous generations, Romero-Mikkelsen and Christensen (2009) used mobile phone surveys and GPS to show that parents both limited (with rules) and facilitated (with rides and companionship) the mobility of children.

Our research focuses on the possible influences of mobile phone use on young people’s spatial explorations and spatial knowledge construction, recovering this field from the dominance of cognitive scientists (see Blades et al., 1998). We are interested in how mobile phones may encourage (or discourage) both spatial learning through direct experience (going to a location) and vicarious learning (hearing about places, seeing images and maps) through electronic means. Through examining the processes of wayfinding, we reach a better understanding of the geographical possibilities of sociality among young people and illustrate how mobile technology allows young people to create social networks at ever-greater distances. The concept of spatial exploration in this paper refers to the changes that mobile phones can make to young people’s spatial mobility on the one hand, by exploring how mobile phones encourage young people to travel to and visit unfamiliar and unknown places to a greater extent than has been previously understood, and on the other hand by recognising that mobile technology can alter the quality of explorations and the processes through which young people construct mental maps. One of the few studies which explores spatial behaviour and mobile use reported that

The very existence of the phone, and the knowledge that parents can call their daughters at any time had given them far more mobility outside the home, and thus more privacy (March and Fleuriot, 2005, p. 170).

Ironically, the same study found that teenage girls thought the worst technological possibilities were those which enabled their parents to track what they say and where they are. Campbell (2005) found in Australia that mobile phones gave parents a (sometimes false) sense of security in being able to locate their children and allowing them a greater spatial range.

Research Context

Mobile phone applications such as global positioning systems (GPS), Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, Google Goggles and Here I am enable users to connect to people, places and information wherever they are, provided that they have a signal. As Hannon and Tims noted

Smartphones blur the line between online and offline worlds—creating new maps and geographies of towns, cities and public spaces (Hannon and Tims, 2010, p. 95).

Individuals create new contacts and knowledge of places or repeat and affirm prior experiences and thereby develop their own identities, sense of belonging and mental maps. In this sense, the relationship between self and place is dependent upon the accumulation of experiences, including complex social interactions, both with and within places (Travlou, 2007; Valentine and Skelton, 2007). This approach views young people as active producers of culture and not passive recipients of adult constructions (Hopkins and Pain, 2007). We challenge work which presents young people as ‘static’ actors amongst flows of interactions, and position them as reflexive agents capable of producing a sense of self and an understanding of place. This understanding is important for this paper as we challenge the assumption that youth will ‘inherit’ from their parents and peers an unproblematic notion of place as known, stable, civil and predicated on ideals of community. Rather, the production of the place is now seen as less stable, as traditional (read local) forms of spatial knowledge are breaking down or become irrelevant to young people (Beck, 1992). Youth are forming networks of their own choice rather than following tradition and

Social relationships and social networks now have to be individually chosen, [on the basis of] interests, ambitions and commitments of individuals, rather than on the basis of proximity (Beck, 1992, pp. 97–98).

Geographers and others have long been interested in the ways in which people develop mental maps of ‘terra incognita’,¹ home-range and neighbourhood identification (Lynch, 1960; Downs and Stea, 1974). In addition, various disciplines (psychology, physiology, neuroscience, anthropology and, more recently, artificial intelligence and computer science) have examined the development of spatial abilities and wayfinding (see Nori et al., 2006; Kirasic, 2000). However, there is still little unanimity in our understanding of how we build mental maps (Allen, 1999). Work by many scholars, including Golledge (1998) and Allen and Golledge (2007) has illuminated the processes by which humans gain spatial knowledge and build varieties of mental maps. Much, however, is still unknown about these processes, but based on our observations and experience, technology is changing the ways in which we build cognitive maps in possibly radical ways (see Baumann, 2009).

The argument we wish to make is that mobility and sociality are a co-constructed set of processes. Thus, while much remains to be understood about how these learning processes work, and while cognitive maps are assumed to differ considerably even among children in the same household, in general a child’s cognitive map expands with age and their ‘home range’—the territory with which they have some familiarity and comfort (Mattsson, 2002). A central question in this research is whether having a mobile phone, particularly one equipped with a GPS, increases or decreases a young person’s propensity to explore their territory and expand their ‘known world’ by offering a ‘lifeline’ to home/safe base and, with a GPS, permit the holder always to know his/her location. Or, conversely, does having a mobile phone decrease both the need to explore (much of what you need can be obtained in familiar space and you can be in contact with friends without sharing the same geographical space) and the motivation (if an authority figure—parent—can track you, are you really exploring terra incognita?). Both of these may be the case in different circumstances.

Given that mobile digital technologies are now so ubiquitous, it is surprising how little is understood of young people’s interactions with mobile phones and how they feature in the management of young people’s movements in time and space (Pain et al., 2005). Jones et al. (2003, p. 168) suggest that young people’s use of mobile phones has the potentiality to generate new childhood spatialities that open out of the “more static (physical) spatialities of other childhood–technology relations”. Mobile phones provide young people with the capacity not only to socialise within diverse networks via texting and social networking sites (Pain et al., 2005), but they may also “increase young people’s geographical freedom” (Hopkins, 2010, p. 217). There are a number of issues to consider here. Although mobile phones enable young people to produce autonomous spaces distant from home, their use is intrinsically bound into the social positioning of the user. For instance, some parents may feel more comfortable in allowing their children to ‘roam’ knowing that they are only a phone call away. Texting friends provides some young people with a mechanism for arranging to meet face-to-face as well as building up wider networks of friends, whilst allowing them to “escape adult surveillance” (Thompson and Cupples, 2008, p. 100) as texting is a private, unseen activity. However, through such increased modes of socialisation, mobile phones also open young people to new spaces of risk, through being drawn into potentially ‘dangerous’ relationships, via social and virtual dating (Perez, 2010), or ‘cyber-bullying’ (Percy-Smith and Matthews, 2001). Mobile phones greatly expand the ‘tyrannical spaces’ in which bullying may take place or is perpetuated, when video recorded on mobile phones of physical attacks, termed ‘happy slapping’, are circulated amongst peer groups (Mann, 2008).

Following Hopkins and Pain’s (2007) call for a greater appreciation of intergenerationality and intersectionality in the lives of young people, we believe greater attention needs to be placed on young people’s interaction with materiality, in this case mobile phones, as communication between young people and their peers and adults are no longer exclusively face-to-face encounters within specific places (Katz and Aakhus, 2002; Licoppe, 2004; Ling, 2008). As Vanderbeck (2007) suggests, each generation seems to have their own specific likes and dislikes and a certain way of communicating or expressing themselves. For Larsen et al. (2006, p. 39) mobile phone cultures produce “small worlds of perpetual catching up and small talk on the move” that serve to blur the distinction between the presence and absence of actants. Young people establish a connected presence using mobile phones within (often) dispersed social networks. The ability to connect synchronously or asynchronously is preferred by many for its ability to give greater control over interactions (Madell and Muncer, 2007). For the current youth generation, Fox (2001) argues, being embedded in perpetual networks of ‘gossip at-a-distance’ is a way of affirming the self within disparate networks that infrequently have face-to-face contact. Young people therefore sublimate tactile personal contacts through Internet and mobile communications to create, negotiate and re-create a sense of self and belonging.

Romero-Mikkelsen and Christensen (2009) suggest that, although there has been a democratisation of the availability of data received through mobile phones, this only gives the illusion that young people are able to exercise or practise more mobility. They argue that central to a young person’s ability to move is their interaction with parents or other adults. This is borne out in the work of Leyshon (2011) who illustrates that adults act as guides in the lives of young people; teaching, nurturing and pointing them in the right direction. As with all human interactions, there are multiple factors influencing child–adult interactions such as a young person’s ethnicity and class, which has an influence on their cultural understanding and knowledge of place. Further, as O’Brien et al. (2000) have argued, gender and age significantly condition young people’s mobility practices. Young women’s mobility is often predicated on a sense of vulnerability (Hart, 1979) and that this is exemplified through their desire to move around with companions (Romero-Mikkelsen and Christensen, 2009) and also that the range of places they are prepared to travel is often more limited that young men of an equivalent age. The interplay of age, generation, gender and place all add complications to an interaction between a young person and mobile technologies. However, we argue that the use of a mobile phone, while in part determined by social encounters and networks, is not limited to an oral or texting medium or simply to provide access to social networking sites; rather, mobile phones are also a tool of discovery that help to map places and to provide knowledge of place.

Mobile phones have become a lifestyle necessity for many young people and ‘texting’ has quickly become a normalised aspect of youth culture. In 2002, according to Thorpe (2002, p. 14) “a quarter of British children between five and sixteen have their own phone and seven to sixteen-year-olds send 12 million messages a day”. By 2012, Youth Research Partners (2010) estimate that there will be 26 million youth mobile phone owners in the UK (up from 24 million in 2010) and that 51 per cent of all mobile revenue (US$4.7million) from youth in the UK will come from data usage on their mobile phones. By 2012, data transfer will be the most commonly used function on a phone thereby shifting the primary function of a mobile phone from communicating between individuals to sending and receiving information to and from a multiplicity of providers. Youth Research Partners data implies that the use of mobile phones has crossed a watershed initially identified by the cultural critic Neil Postman (2000) who argued that mobile data transactions now constitute a new media ecology. For him, this ecosystem is in the process of radical change because person-to-person telephony is in inexorable decline as appointment telephony is coming to an end.² This is not to suggest that person-to-person communication will disappear altogether; rather, it will continue to exist for the simple reason that some things are best conveyed personally. Yet Postman does suggest that it will lose its dominance with profound consequences for us all. Smart phones in particular are a ‘pull’ medium in which nothing comes to the user unless they choose it, tap on it and pull it down to the screen.

As youth culture expands in new unchartered, unchaperoned ways as information retrieval becomes more accessible, the ‘ecological flexibility’ of mobile phones (Weilenmann and Larsson, 2001) will still offer young people the opportunity to socialise and network; but importantly it will further incorporate more functionality in terms of information provision, especially about places and facilities. To cater for this, mobile phone manufacturers have increased screen size and resolution and have developed faster data transfer through mobile networks. ‘Bing’, Microsoft’s search engine, is designed for mobile phones to filter out the informational ‘noise’ of the Internet for quicker searches. Although the market for mobile phones is reaching saturation (Youth Research Partners, 2010), their ‘apps’ are proliferating—there are currently 650 000 applications (apps) for an iPhone—and their uses expanding daily.

The International Telecommunication Union recently predicted that by the end of 2011 there would be 5 billion mobile phones in use (for a global population approaching 7 billion). Young people are particularly enthusiastic consumers of the technology. In the US, a Kaiser Family Foundation study found that mobile phone ownership had increased among 15–18-year-olds from 56 per cent in 2004 to 85 per cent in 2009 (Rideout et al., 2010). In Japan, 20 per cent of high school girls own two phones, while Korean teenagers’ attachment to mobile phones causes consternation in some circles. In Sweden, 80 per cent of teenagers had mobile phones in 2001. Relatively few young people in the US and the UK—where our surveys were conducted—are without access to mobile phones.

Increasingly, mobile phones come equipped with such way-finding devices as a global positioning system, access to the Internet with Google maps, aerial photography and Street View, as well as ‘apps’ such as Buzz, Loopt and Latitude. Such apps enable one to ‘broadcast’ one’s location, find nearby friends or points of interest, anticipate hazards such as traffic jams, identify landmarks and obtain verbal information about one’s surroundings. The US telephony company Sprint offers a service called the ‘family locator’ which allows parents to track their children via either phone or computer. The service gives the child’s real-time location by address and nearby landmarks. While some parents welcomed the technology for safety reasons (especially for young women; Bond, 2011), some teenagers object to reduced privacy. Such technology, available in other countries, is making the urban landscape more ‘transparent’. One no longer need enter a restaurant before knowing if your friend is there. An anonymous-looking building may be revealed as a club or exclusive store. With maps and Street View, one need never be ‘lost’ again. However, as Vanderbeck (2007) cautions, too much adult regulation and surveillance during adolescence can actually hinder identity formation and personal risk management (see also 10News.com, 2006). This seems to suggest that adults should critically view their role as a regulator in the lives of children and find a balance between healthy needed regulation/surveillance while simultaneously giving space for independence and identity.

Methodology

This research is positioned within the interdisciplinary field of neighbourhood effects literature which examines critically how small changes to the lifestyles of young people in their neighbourhoods can have significant influence on their future wellbeing (Spilsbury et al., 2009). Methodologically, the research sought to work with young people (Mallan et al., 2010; Bond, 2011) to explore why place matters (Anderson and Jones, 2009). Such approaches are informed by work in cultural geography and, in particular, in children’s geographies, which takes seriously the post-structuralist critique of the production of knowledge by attempting to destabilise the presumed centrality of the researcher to the making of meaning and the unequal relation of power that characterises academic research, especially with young people (Holt, 2004). A methodological approach that positions researchers and research volunteers in a collaborative relationship as co-producers of knowledge, clearly has implications for how and what data are collected. However, this does not imply the abdication of responsibility by the researcher for ensuring the quality and recognising the limitations of the research outcomes. The methods used here address some of the challenges identified by Splisbury et al. (2009) who note that there are limitations to the quantitative, instrumental approach to understanding children’s understanding of neighbourhoods.

Building upon this work, and allied to the impracticalities of following young people as they traverse their daily spaces, we encouraged young people to be actively involved in data collection by recording their use of mobile phones to locate themselves in the world. We deliberately emphasise research with young people in the belief that research is a shared process of knowledge creation between all those participating in the project, in whatever capacity.³ Throughout the research process, we attempted to provide young people with culturally credible ways of explaining their lives through a variety of techniques such as mobile phone text messages, informal discussions, photography and diaries. The success of such work depends in part on mutual trust between researcher and research volunteers and a willingness to engage with young people on their own terms.

This approach is not without its challenges, especially when negotiating with ‘gatekeepers’ who will facilitate and influence the context of the research. We made a deliberate decision to contact young research volunteers through schools and universities, reflecting the target population of 16–19-year-olds. This is widely recognised as a transitional period in the lives of young people as they move from being a child to an adult. Young people’s spatial practices of encountering neighbourhoods develops significantly beyond their parental home during this period (Furlong, 2009). Our research was conducted in the spring of 2009 in Warren, New Jersey, and Falmouth, Cornwall, and subsequently in the spring/summer of 2010 in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The sites were chosen in part for convenience, as the authors’ places of employment, and because familiarity with the spaces and places being discussed by young people also aids interpretation and analysis. The research represents a comparison not only of young people who live at home with those who have recently left home but also a transnational study between young people in the US and the UK. Whilst there are some problems in making this direct comparison (such as different cultural politics, the different nature of place-based identities and the configuration of urban and rural spaces in the two study areas), few studies have attempted to provide an international perspective to youth studies. Nevertheless, such a perspective is important in an age of global connection and the ubiquity of mobile technologies, at least in the global North.

The size of participating groups reflects a combination of three factors: the class size, the social groupings within classes⁴ and the fact that young people could opt-in to the research programme. In conducting the research for this project, we used a range of interpretative methods, each of which allowed the young people involved to express themselves in different ways and talk freely about their lives and how they situate themselves within an array of other narratives. These methods are not dependent on either a minimum sample size or the same sample size across the locations under comparison. In both the US and the UK, the young people selected their own themes to discuss broadly around the issues of mobile phones and everyday life. We believe this free-form approach fosters an invigorating and engaging context. Some of the methods we employed were quite private and individual to young people—for example, using self-directed photography and one-to-one interviews. Other techniques, such as in-depth discussion groups and group posters, opened up spaces for discussion. Placing young people at the centre of the research helped to elicit complex and detailed micro geographies and richly textured accounts of what it means to grow up.

Case Studies

Watchung Hills Regional High School is located in the outer suburbs of New York City and enrolls over 2000 children from middle- and high-income households. The milieu in which the school is set is one of large lots and few sidewalks. Many of the older students have driving licences and some own cars. The University of Exeter, Cornwall Campus, near Falmouth is set in 70 acres of countryside, but close to the waterside towns of Penryn and Falmouth. With a paucity of public transport and a rural setting, car ownership among students is around 75 per cent (n = 258). Rutgers University is located in urban New Jersey and, while many students own cars, use of public transport (bus and train) for both local trips and going into ‘the City’ (New York) is common.

Research at Watchung Hills Regional High School

At Watchung Hills Regional High School (WHRHS), students served both as researchers and as subjects. The research project was a capstone experience for the students in an Advanced Placement Human Geography course. The goal was to provide the students with an authentic social research experience. Since the subject of our research is young people, the project was designed for the student researchers both to develop critical research skills and to apply them in their school community and social networks. At every step in the research process, the authors provided support, guidance and feedback.

The process began with a meeting of the authors with the students in which we outlined our interests in the subject and provided the students with background on work conducted so far. We then divided the students into three research teams, each of which was to pursue their own project under the supervision of the authors. In setting research topics, the authors instructed the students to develop questions related to the theme ‘young people and mobile technology’. Three topics emerged

The effects of mobile technologies on family relationships.

Whether mobile technologies encourage exploration of unfamiliar places.

The effects of mobile technologies on friendships over time and distance.

In this paper, we focus on the second topic (although we reference relevant data from the other groups) which the students labelled ‘Mobile technologies and the exploration of terra incognita’. With our help, the eight students in this group developed a questionnaire and interview schedule to answer their hypotheses

Students will print out map/directions from the Internet before travelling to unknown places.

Students are more willing to travel to terra incognita if they have a mobile phone.

Students get to know a place less well when they use a GPS.

The group conducted surveys of 200 students at the school on their mobile phone/Internet usage and their travel preferences and habits. The team also conducted 20 in-depth interviews with random students to provide more in-depth comments. Each team of researchers produced a research report and an oral presentation. After receiving the student work, the authors then reviewed and analysed the research findings.

Research at the University of Exeter, UK, and Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, USA

The questionnaire survey initially developed at WHRHS was, with guidance from the research team, adapted for the UK and administered by a group of nine undergraduate students at the University of Exeter. They disseminated the questionnaire and received 30 responses; four students completed personal diaries and took photographs of places they visited using their GPS-enabled mobile phones. The research team conducted three follow-up focus groups with 24 participants and a further six one-to-one interviews. All participants were aged 18–19. At Rutgers, the undergraduate students (15 in one class, 13 in another) completed questionnaires.

The research team was responsible for analysing the questionnaires; however, the themes of the interviews and discussion groups were determined between the research team and the students. This research is exploratory and makes no claim for statistical representativeness. In all cases, students participated voluntarily and answered surveys anonymously.

Empirical Evidence

In this section, heeding Graham’s (1998, pp. 180–181) warning that researchers should attempt to avoid “naïve assumptions about simple, cause-and-effect, social and spatial ‘impacts’”, we examine two themes. First, how the subtle blendings of human actors and technical artifacts interact with the rhythms of networks of young people. Secondly, how young people experience the de/localisation of self through mobile phones and how mobile phones (re)shape different experiences of place. In so doing, we will illustrate how mobile phones are affecting the places, scales, spatialities and trajectories of young peoples’ lives. These themes are illustrated through detailing four distinct but interwoven sub-themes: the prevalence of mobile technologies; pre-trip planning and paper maps; encouraging exploration of terra incognita and finally, knowing a place.

Prevalence of Mobile Technologies

This research, unsurprisingly, provides compelling support for the findings of Ling (2008) and Sutko and de Souza e Silva (2011) for the prevalence of mobile technologies among young people, the saturation levels of which are remarkable. All of the students in the UK (n = 30) and 99 per cent of the US high school students (n = 228) reported owning a mobile phone and, of those who owned a mobile phone, 86 per cent (US, n = 228) and 72 per cent (UK, n = 30) reported first obtaining a mobile phone in middle school (ages 11–13). Students have become so dependent on access to their mobile phones that 94 per cent (US, n = 228) and 98 per cent (UK, n = 30) reported they would not consider leaving the house without it. The data also illustrate some interesting characteristics of mobile phone usage among young people. In each of our sample populations, mobile phones were used much more for texting than talking (ratio of 4 texts to 1 call). This is both because texting can be cheaper and because it can be done (surreptitiously) in class (80 per cent (n = 258) of our sample in the US text in classes or lectures) or other restricted places. A further advantage is that it is asynchronous so one does not have to respond immediately (if at all). As Becky stated

You can be pretty sure that a text will arrive … and you can’t or I can’t seem to avoid it … I have to get back (Becky, 18, Falmouth, UK).

Most students used texting to arrange meetings—81 per cent (n = 30) in the UK and 85 per cent (n = 228) in the US; to keep tabs on friends—70 per cent (n = 258) of students in the UK/US contact their college friends more than 5 times a day via their mobile phone either through texts, e-mail or social networking sites; and generally to feel integrated into whichever groups they belonged. In both the US and UK, the vast majority (over 95 per cent, n = 258) of students stated that mobile phones enable one to meet up with (or avoid) friends at short notice.

Further, the research suggests an interesting dynamic in student–parent relationships. In theory mobile technology allows young people greater distance and autonomy from parental supervision. In reality, a great deal of reported mobile phone communication was between young people and their parents. Sixty per cent of high school students (n = 200) and 54.5 per cent (n = 58) of university students reported receiving contact from parents at least one to three times during the school day, while a further 10 per cent (in the US, n = 228) reported such contact more than four times per day. In the UK, 72.7 per cent (n = 30) and, in the US, 85.6 per cent (n = 228) of students said that their parents felt they could call them whenever they wanted. This is illustrated in Fran’s (19, Falmouth, UK) comments

Fran:

My Mum calls me a couple of times a day to talk about stuff.

Charlie:

My mum knows not to call me [laughter].

Fran:

No it’s not like that, we’ve always been close and we like talking … You know about stuff like shopping.

In addition, students identified parents as important sources in wayfinding: 78 per cent (n = 258) reported asking their parents’ advice on determining routes—as Simon (19, Falmouth, UK) reported “My dad seems to know where stuff is”, indicating that they would be much more likely to phone parents if they were lost than friends or siblings. GPS has also become an important technological tool for young people. Of the students with driving licences, 90 per cent (n = 258) had access to a car-based GPS. Reliance on GPS was prevalent enough that 19 per cent (US, n = 228) and 15 per cent (UK, n = 30) of students reported they would feel uncomfortable driving in their own hometown without a GPS.

Pre-trip Planning and Paper Maps

Our evidence suggests that the use of the paper map as a wayfinding tool for young people is on the demise. Road maps, once commonly available at gas stations, have been made obsolete by map applications such as MapQuest and Google Maps. These digital versions were viewed by the young people as ‘more up-to-date’, scalable, ‘free’ (excluding the cost of their phone contract) and ‘more easily accessible’ than the traditional paper versions. One research hypothesis was that students would consult on-line sources and print maps to unfamiliar destinations before leaving home. Despite widespread access to these tools, very few students reported using these methods for pre-trip planning. Our research, similarly to the work of Fyhri et al. (2011), illustrates that young people are often highly spontaneous in organising gatherings. Texts sent by ‘master weavers’—young people who act as gatekeepers for groups of 20–30 friends who send in excess of 2000 texts per month—bringing friends together are often “sent last minute” (Jo, 19, Falmouth, UK). These master weavers not only co-ordinate time, but also organise social space by calling people together as described by Julie (18, Falmouth, UK)

Julie:

I usually send out two to two and half thousand texts a month [laughs].

Charlie:

Yeah, if you want to arrange something you tell Julie and she tells everyone else.

James:

Wow, how much does that cost?

Julie:

I have an unlimited text package.

Clock time therefore becomes an inadequate method of organising the social life of young people as they respond to text messages when they are received. In this way, mobile phones become a tool of preparedness for visualising future space(s) or future events as well as providing the means for ‘finding’ the event. Thus, the mobile phone changes the way young people experience the world by changing the relationships between absence and distance and proximity and presence. We argue that GPS-enabled phones produce a new syntax of place by changing the narrative ordering of travelling from ‘here’ to ‘there’ to one of always ‘here’ or wherever the GPS locates oneself. The mobile phone is therefore always in a flux of delocating and relocating the mobile body (Sanders, 2008).

We asked respondents to rank methods by frequency of use for getting directions to a previously unknown location. Options included asking for help, using technology (whether Web or GPS) and consulting a printed map. Significantly, the map was ranked as the last option behind mobile phones, GPS, parents, friends and siblings. For the spatially challenged (and drivers at the wheel), written (or spoken) directions to “turn at exit 9 for route 18 north” (Amy, 17, Warren, NJ) are easier than map reading. However, ‘door to door’ written/spoken directions do not convey the context in the same way a map does. Directions are more often relative (right, second exit) than cardinal. Distances are in minutes rather than miles. How these directions and the guided travel experience are incorporated into the individual’s cognitive map is a topic for future research.

Encouraging Exploration of Terra Incognita

The second hypothesis that ‘young people are more willing to travel to terra incognita if they have a mobile phone’ makes the assumption that the comfort of being able to call a family member or friend and/or having GPS mobile phone directions would encourage exploration. Young people in New Jersey were asked about their familiarity with and frequency of visitation to hometowns and nearby cities of Plainfield, Newark and New York. The two former cities are socioeconomically depressed, while New York—usually understood as Manhattan—is a global destination. While over half of the students polled carry their mobile phone with them at all times, and most expressed greater comfort with travelling to any destination with a mobile phone, they demonstrated greater willingness to travel to less familiar places, even to New York and Newark, if they had mobile phones and could rely significantly on GPS systems. For example, while only 18 per cent (n = 200) of WHRHS students sampled reported feeling comfortable travelling in Newark (the largest city in New Jersey and one with high levels of poverty and violence⁵) without technological assistance, 68 per cent (n = 200) indicated they would feel comfortable accompanied by a GPS.⁶

In the UK, 82 per cent (n = 30) of those sampled felt uncomfortable travelling in a city (such as London) without a mobile phone—recording personal fear and unfamiliarity with the area as reasons for needing a phone. However, they agreed that they would feel happy to explore lesser-known places, especially attending “gigs, clubs, parties” (Ben, 19, Falmouth, UK) in London provided they had a mobile phone. Jenny (18, Falmouth, UK) illustrated this point when she reflected “If I have my iPhone with me I can pretty much find out what I need to know about a place. I never really feel lost with it”. The 2010 Rutgers students were older and more familiar with urban as well as suburban places. Nevertheless, they too reported heavy reliance (82 per cent, n = 28) on mobiles for navigating and, as critically, locating friends and/or destinations especially as a pedestrian (using Foursquare and Facebook Places) and most used car GPS when driving (65 per cent, n = 28).

While students identified their GPS as an important wayfinding tool, in terms of encouraging exploration it is the mobile phone that is considered most important. Of driving-age students, in the US 61 per cent (n = 228) and in the UK 79 per cent (n = 30) reported preferring a mobile phone to a car GPS if they could have access to only one. In other words, the students felt more confident in being able to phone or text a family member or friend rather than on relying on GPS systems, expressing a preference for social interaction over electronic assistance. More pedestrians than drivers (at Rutgers and Exeter Universities) reported using Google Street View and various ‘apps’ which locate friends, bars and retail outlets. Young people in the study used, for example, Yelp (which provides locations and reviews of restaurants, stores etc.), Urbanspoon (restaurants), Flixster (movies), I-Vegetarian (vegetarian restaurants and food), Foursquare or Loopt (services and friends) and Google Latitude (friends). These are the digerati generation; for example, the WHRHS students’ mental maps of Manhattan are derived in considerable part from digital sources and are probably more complete (and certainly more up-to-date) than non-digital analogues. Asked, however, if having a mobile phone makes one feel safer when exploring new places, most responded in the affirmative (over 80 per cent in the US and UK samples, n = 258) saying that a phone was useful in emergencies. As Samantha (17, Warren, NJ) explained, “If I’m lost and my signal has gone I call my dad [from a payphone]”.

The ability to contact a responsible adult if necessary and, for some, the ability to use the phone for wayfinding, added considerably to their confidence in negotiating unknown space. Interestingly, none of the participants in the research recorded feeling resentful of possible adult surveillance. As Charlton et al.’s (2002) research discovered, when students reflected on the role of mobile technology in family relationships, they reported a surprising amount of two-way communication between parents and children, suggesting a desire among students to remain within easy contact of their parents while at the same time enjoying more geographical independence. As Bond (2011) has noted, mobile phones produce a myriad of complex relationships between parents and children. Our research suggests that young people recognise the importance of being paradoxically connected virtually in time on a ‘digital leash’ (Ling, 1997), to their parents, whilst being disconnected, absent from their parents, in place.

Knowing a Place

The third question we explored, that ‘people get to know a place less when they use a GPS’ provided insights into mental map construction. Students in the US and the UK reported that through using a mobile GPS, they experienced less exploration of possible alternative routes, less effort to memorise landmarks en route and generally less mental map construction. For example, MapQuest directions will provide the most direct route and make exploration and remembering landscape features redundant. As some students reflected, “with a GPS, local surroundings are forgotten and the destination is the main goal” (Miriam, 18, Warren, NJ). In this way, the unfamiliar or “scary” (Anne, 19, Falmouth, UK) can remain unknown and is reduced to time travelled.

Even in Manhattan, which has a grid system of streets largely conforming to the points of the compass, students reported using a phone or GPS to orient themselves. The US students stated that heavy reliance on a GPS/phone has “allowed people to travel with a blank mind, not using all senses” (Brad, 18, Warren, NJ). Much has been written about the diversion of attention by mobile phone use; a New York Times (2009) series reports, inter alia, that in the US at any given time 11 per cent of drivers are talking on mobile phones despite its illegality in many states. Certainly, mobile phones and GPS screens divert the driver (and sometimes passengers) from landscape observation. It should be noted that most of the questions asked in the survey did not specify whether the journeys were on foot or by car or other forms of transport. Most respondents in NJ appeared to assume that the questions referred to car travel, except when in Manhattan (which is more easily accessed by mass transit). When younger, most children would have learned about their ‘home range’ by walking, possibly cycling, and by being a passenger in the school bus or a car. Very few older children both in the US and the UK (under 10 per cent, n = 58) seem to explore on foot, stating this is at least in part due to the lack of pedestrian-friendly environs, a fear of being in open spaces and the ease and convenience of driving.

Evidence to support the ‘travelling with a closed mind’ assertion also comes from student construction of physical maps. The high school and university students were asked to create maps of their journey from home to school. The majority of students had difficulty recalling street names or natural landmarks (although the local bagel shop (US) and the pubs (UK) were almost universally indicated). They also found it difficult to illustrate relative distances between turns on the map. Only a very small minority was able to indicate cardinal directions. To explore this concept further, students were asked to ‘get lost on (or with a) purpose’ by taking a wrong turn on their journey home. Students reported discovering whole landscapes they had never noticed before—often one street away from their homes.

Although becoming lost can be unsettling, it may have value—as Klinkenborg recounted on a drive home through unfamiliar territory using a GPS

As I drove, I admired not only the beauty of the night but also the pleasurable sense of being comfortably lost (Klinkenborg, 2009, p. 3; emphasis added).

With the GPS, he could navigate unknown spaces, but do so with equanimity. A year later, another New York Times editorial urged us to “Turn off GPS: drive towards serendipity” in order to focus attention on the ‘real’ landscape rather than a digital roadway (Kulish, 2010). As Jones (2007) notes, younger children enjoy a certain pleasure in getting lost ‘on purpose’ to explore new territory, to challenge their adventurousness, to seek out new places and perhaps find anonymity there. However, when students in the UK and the US were asked if they had been lost in the past year, very few (less than 15 per cent, n = 258) reported that they had, and then that they were lost ‘by mistake’ not deliberately.

Nevertheless, there is some evidence to suggest that as young people age their inner explorers begin to assert themselves. Asked if when using GPS or digital directions they ever take ‘short cuts’ or use a variation from the recommended route for some reason, most Rutgers and Exeter students said they quite frequently veered from the recommended route to avoid traffic or to include an intervening attraction such as a friend’s house or a particular store. Several noted that deviating from the official (mobile phone recommended) route does not run the risk of getting lost since one’s trusty navigational tool could adjust. These older students also reported getting lost ‘on purpose’ at times just, as one put it, “to make life more interesting” (Jon, 19, New Brunswick, NJ). Some explored new territory without relying on technology for variation and novelty, although even if not using a mobile, having it as a backup provided confidence.

Conclusion

This paper has detailed exploratory research into the mobile phone geographies of young people. Even though the data collected come from slightly different types of surveys and are not directly comparable, similar patterns of mobile phone use by young people can be discerned in both the UK and the US examples. Our research illustrates that, while GPS-enabled mobile phones give young people confidence to explore new territory in digitally enhanced ways, the quality of that exploration is made different from discovering places without a mobile phone. We would therefore like to bring the themes of this paper together to counter debates on mobile phone use which often assign (uncritically) causative power to them by claiming that mobile phones “radically change things either for the worse or the better” (Pfaff, 2010, p. 1442). In doing so, we challenge, albeit cautiously, two popular myths associated with mobile phones. First, the revolution in mobile technology has caused the ‘death of distance’ and created a borderless world through space–time compression. This emphasises Russell’s (19, Falmouth, UK) point that “with a GPS mobile phone, you’re never really lost”. Secondly, mobile technologies atomise quotidian life into a series of impersonal mediated encounters. The technological determinism inherent in these propositions is central to our criticism. This is not to abandon the notion that mobile phones have some causative effects that in turn enable the user to interact in the world in different ways, but to acknowledge Graham’s (1998, p. 167) observation that mobile phones are part of “complex, contingent and subtle blendings of human actors and technical artefacts”. Although with location software such as Google Street View or Maps or shop-finding ‘apps’, they appear to produce non-places where there are fewer visual surprises on encountering place(s) and that wayfinding to those places is programmed and pre-determined by software, proximity to place is still produced through networks of individuals organising and sustaining friendship.

One reading of our research may suggest that terra incognita is now only an imaginary concept. With a mobile phone, exploring places becomes simply a function of being able to access data, including how to travel to and from a destination and sites of interest. This would appear to suggest that everything we need to know about places already exists. The behavioural neuroscientist Ellard (2009) argues that our mental maps of the physical world have become sparser over the course of human evolution and our way-finding talents are inferior to those of various species of insects, geese and turtles, inter alia. He argues that our reliance on GPS technology is both a sign of, and perhaps an encouragement of, our reduced spatial understanding. Another neurobiologist, Spiers, similarly worries that “we might as a culture lose the skill of mapping our environment, relying on the Web to tell us how to navigate” as the cells of our hippocampus are reduced (Markoff, 2009, p. D1). Wayfinding through mobile technology produces in the mind of the traveller a form of topographical erasure of the physical world. Mobile phones therefore may reduce the need to build mental maps, just as the Web has reduced the need to retain other details in human memory.

In our opinion, this is rather too bleak a view. Mobile phones do provide insights to locations that encourage young people to travel, discover and make human connections—the implications of this work for geographies of mobility would be interesting to consider. Mobile phones open up spaces of exploration, even though, for young people, travelling to locations becomes time-travelled rather than time-explored. In this way, distance is not erased or accelerated or indeed not experienced. Geography still intrudes into their lifestyles as travelling becomes the practice of “tuning-out time” (Ben, 19, Falmouth, UK) en route to more interesting places.

Understanding the geographical possibilities of sociality in wayfinding and exploration helps to explain the seeming contradiction in our findings. Mobile technology allows young people to create social networks at ever-greater distances—providing an incentive to visit new places—while at the same time obviating the necessity of paying attention to where you are going. Just as Sutko and de Souza e Silva (2011) discovered, although it is assumed that location-aware mobile media increase spatial awareness, the assumption may be fallacious. These are not borderless worlds, but rather are directed and channelled routeways. Through using their mobile phones, young people are simultaneously connected (virtually) to locations, friends and family and disconnected (corporeally) to roads and routeways. Arguably, this finding presents new questions for children’s geographies of sociability.

However, young peoples’ abilities to self-organise information systems and patterns of information still rely heavily, in Boden and Molotch’s (1994) terms, on a compulsion for proximity or, as Goffman (1973) suggested, a compulsion to gather. Face-to-face co-presence in a shared social space is often preferred to mobile mediation and affords, to quote Rettie (2009, p. 422), “thicker information” to be mediated. Turtle (2011) suggests young people understand the illusion of companionship that mobile phones provide by utilising them as a tool for sustaining, and not replacing, physical human connections. The mobile phone in this way is co-actor in producing social gatherings through locating and establishing an “inside-space” of individuals within a network (Gergen, 2002, p. 238). Obviously, this is only one mode of self-organising, as Facebook, Twitter and other social networking software platforms also produce points of contact and inclusion (as well as exclusion). Importantly for this study, once these technologies are linked to GPS, they enable users to gather together. We argue therefore that the focus of further research should be the spatial and temporal intersections created by software, technology and mobility in the co-production of young people’s lives.

Further research involving more formally collected data will be necessary to confirm, contradict or elaborate on our exploratory findings. At this stage, we believe that further empirical research is required that is not too intrusive into young people’s lifestyles, such as that by Wiehe et al. (2008) who used GPS-enabled phones to track adolescent travel patterns. Mobile technology is changing so fast that studies seemingly become obsolete quickly. Just as the initial euphoria about the politically liberating effects of the Internet (after Iran, Moldova and the recent ‘Arab Spring’) is diminishing in light of the realisation that it can also be used by repressive regimes to identify and locate dissidents (Morozov, 2011), so too may the drawbacks of mobile phones outweigh the obvious benefits of expanding young people’s mental maps.

Footnotes

Notes

Funding Statement

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

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