Introducing multitasking to the study of travel and ICT: Examining its extent and assessing its potential importance

Abstract

Personal travel is undertaken principally as a means of access: to opportunities, services, social networks and other goods. The Internet now provides an additional form of access, enabling many activities to be reached without recourse to physical mobility by the individual undertaking the activity. However, the social and transport effects of this 'virtual mobility' are uncertain. Here, it is argued that the incidence and properties of multitasking are a necessary part of the assessment of such impacts. Participation in activities and, thus, change in activity participation will not be fully measured without consideration of the parallel conduct of activities. This paper presents a review, empirical evidence and discussion to support this hypothesis. Emergent from an examination of the literature and examined by new empirical evidence are three observations or hypotheses, namely that: (1), failure to consider multitasking leads to the underreporting of key activities; (2), misrepresentation of activity participation tends to be more pronounced for certain key groups; and (3), lack of awareness of multitasking could lead to the flawed measurement and thus misrepresentation of behaviour change over time. Further to these observations from the literature, study findings suggest that multitasking behaviour is also found to vary according to whether the primary activity is being undertaken online or offline. Taken together, the empirical evidence confirms that the consideration of multitasking is likely to have important implications for the study of travel, Internet use and interactions between the two.

Towards a microeconomic framework for modelling the joint choice of activity–travel behaviour and ICT use

“…Such activities, referred to as tele-activities, following the term telecommuting coined by John Nilles in 1970s, have received considerable attention from a number of researchers for almost 40 years, especially from the perspective of transport studies (Salomon, 1986;Bailey and Kurland, 2002;Mokhtarian et al, 2004;Andreev et al, 2010). Moreover, due to their spatio-temporal flexibility, tele-activities display also higher potential for being undertaken simultaneously with other activities, thus linking to the concept of multitasking (Lyons and Urry, 2005;Kenyon and Lyons, 2007;Pawlak et al, 2011).…”

Mobile Eating: A Cultural Perspective

“…Amidst heightened anxiety levels and increased car time, people shifted eating into the automobile. Eating in the car enabled multi-tasking, in which people engaged in two activities at once to gain time (Kenyon and Lyons 2007). Of the 2.5 hours a day US citizens spend eating, 68 minutes or 45% occurred along with another task, mostly driving.…”

Decomposing, Transforming, and Contextualising (e)-Shopping

“…Yet reconfiguration can go further than a temporal and spatial rescheduling of an activity in isolation from other activities. Reconfiguration can take the shape of`multitasking', which is about whether several activities are conducted simultaneously or piled on top of one another (Felker Kaufman et al, 1991;Kenyon and Lyons, 2007;Mattingly and Bianchi, 2003;Sullivan, 1997). Examples include browsing the Internet for a gadget while watching television, or downloading songs from iTunes when travelling on the train.…”