Exploration of human activity fragmentation in cyber and physical spaces using massive mobile phone data

Abstract

The rapid development of information and communications technology (ICT) in recent years leads to the emergence of cyber space and results in the fragmentation of human activities to some extent. Nevertheless, few studies focused on the exploration of fragmentation, the new characteristic of human activities, partially due to the limited access to proper datasets. In this work, massive Call Detail Records (CDR) data and Uniform Resource Locator (URL) data from millions of mobile phone users are used to extract the activity fragmentation in both cyber and physical spaces. The relationships between activity fragmentation in the two spaces and built environment factors are further examined at different geographical scales. The results show that: 1) the spatial distributions of physical human activity fragmentation (PHAF) and cyber human activity fragmentation (CHAF) are inversely correlated; 2) compared with PHAF, CHAF are less associated with the built environment, probably because cyber activities are less restricted in time and space; 3) CHAF are more influenced by physical fragmentations and the relationships are stable across different cites, indicating that cyber space cannot be completely detached from physical space; and 4) the impact of built environment on CHAF and PHAF are different across different cities. The findings not only shed deeper light on activity fragmentation, but also enlighten the future exploration of its association with both cyber and physical spaces.

Keywords

• Fragmentation
• cyber space
• human activity
• built environment