Passive virtual personal mobility’ occurs continuously through incoming messages via e-mail or chat, whereas 'active virtual personal mobility' constitutes elective networking activity. This article explores the continuous nature of individuals' active virtual mobilities, focusing on the consequential changes in our everyday lives and their psychological, economic, spatial, personal, and social implications. The emergence of continuous virtual individual mobilities encompasses three phases: the Internet and emailing, smartphones, and social networking platforms. Continuous networking implies utilizing time as a form of network capital, thereby creating a competition between networking and other activities, such as leisure, work, and sleep. The most alarming time displacement pattern has been observed in sleep, potentially causing health and circadian issues for people of all ages. Social networking has been hailed for its numerous benefits, primarily facilitating friendship-making and empathy while promoting the globalization of social relationships, interest communities, and broader perspectives. Internet users have adopted free-of-charge networking worldwide, with a preference for specific platforms in several countries. Heavy use turns networking into a master of virtual personal mobility, as its extensive use brings about additional individual mobilities, both virtual and physical. Thus, exposure to advertisements may lead to increased online and physical shopping, and extended networking with some partners may necessitate face-to-face meetings with them. A network society differs from a networking society in that it focuses on physical and virtual flows occurring among cities and their inhabitants. The networking society is all about connectivity, with connected individuals serving as nodes regardless of their physical locations

This article explores the nature of compulsory elements within daily mobilities that seemingly present freedom and personal autonomy, notably in the ability of individuals to choose among several mobility modes and technological vehicles for these movements. We argue that behind this supposedly 'free' look of these personal mobilities, some essential and rather compulsory motivations for mobility are hidden. Thus, these mobilities constitute sublimated activities that reflect primary intrinsic and extrinsic motivations for human mobility, notably the intrinsic needs for food and water and the extrinsic ones of proximity to people and curiosity satiation. The compulsory background of these mobilities might have potentially called for some preference by individuals for the more convenient virtual mobility that saves time, cost, and effort. However, most mobilities for commuting, social interaction, and grocery shopping are performed physically, whereas information searches are carried out online. People prefer physical touch for groceries and wish for face-to-face contact and social interaction at work. However, regarding information search, the virtual Internet is far more convenient than physically moving to information sources.

The COVID-19 pandemic led to a sudden shift to digital remote work for most office workers worldwide. This article aims to survey and interpret global data on the shares of four workplace location options that have been adopted since the pandemic: working entirely in designated workplaces, working entirely from home, hybrid work in both workplaces and workers' houses, and international digital nomadism. Working at home, fully or partially, became technologically possible in the 1970s, and even more so following the introduction of the commercial Internet in 1995. However, remote work was only modestly adopted before the pandemic, being unpreferred by both employers and employees. During the pandemic, the number of people working from home increased dramatically, resulting in a significant shift in habits for both employers and employees. Following the decline of the pandemic, the global share of full remote workers declined, but working partially from home remained significant. Global digital nomadism, following the decline of the pandemic, remains modest but continues to grow. Remote work has become a substantial mode of virtual mobility compared to other virtual activities, notably online shopping and digital networking. The emerging locational elasticity of work has led to spatially expanded residential and economic suburbanization.

Distance, a concept that continues to be relevant and rather complex, is far from being obsolete despite its diminishing role in the age of virtual space. It represents spatial separation, a notion that was first quantified in Egypt some 5,000 years ago. The evolution of distance can be traced through five distinct phases: natural (absolute and relative distances), relational (time and cost distances, distance decay, friction of distance, and distanciation), technological (extensibility, accessibility, and speed), virtual (proximity, digital, cognitive, and metaphorical distances), and optional (optional and estimated distances). These historical phases have built upon each other, leading to our contemporary experience of all distance classes depending on specific separation cases. Modern humans may overcome any distance on earth, one way or another, unless prevented from doing so by political national sovereignties.

This paper explores country penetration levels of major Internet applications replacing physical activities. This exploration first aims to learn whether high penetration levels typify large or small countries. Second, it seeks to see whether wealthier countries, among the largest ones by population, lead penetration levels for major Internet applications. Previous data for 2010 showed that smaller countries led globally in their penetration levels, and it was not for wealthier countries to lead among the most prominent countries worldwide. The 2023 data for Internet penetration, for the adoption of smartphones, as well as for the penetration levels for the leading networking platforms (Facebook, Twitter (X), WhatsApp, Instagram, and TikTok) all reveal similar trends: high penetration levels typified both developing and developed countries and small, and usually wealthy, countries achieved the highest penetration scores worldwide. Thus, the trends studied in 2010 were not temporary. Thus, Digital networking is globally and freely available, possibly encouraging interaction and literacy. As far as e-mails are concerned, they are also automatically used by private, institutional, business, and IOT entities. Therefore, the list of leading countries for e-mail use for 2023 consists of developed countries. Online shopping levels depend on the economic status of individuals, so it was for developed countries to lead the 2023 list of online shopping levels.

Personal mobilities constitute self-driven mobilities, both physical, notably by car, and virtual ones, notably over fixed-line and mobile telephones as well as through the Internet. More broadly defined, though, personal mobilities may include also mobilities that are carried out by individuals via public transportation media. Personal mobilities present numerous features and related significances: autonomy, choice, extensibility, speed, accessibility, convenience, fixity, displacement, activity, sociality, directionality, circularity, automation, time-space compression, and distanciation. Whereas the spatial context for physical personal mobilities is obvious, the exact nature of virtual space and its relationships with the physical one has received several interpretations and conceptualizations: cyberspace, hybrid space, spatial media, and Internet space. Personal mobility constitutes an expression of personal autonomy, which in itself nests within the wider social value of personal freedom.

This chapter sheds some light on immobility in light of mobility, notably as far as the COVID-19 pandemic human experiences are concerned. The worldwide coronavirus experiences of individuals for their physical and virtual (im)mobilities, and even more so for their post-COVID-19 experience in this regard, may amount to some societal transitions in the relationships between mobility and immobility. This is so in at least two respects: the perception of immobility as a positive or negative condition, as well as its assessment as a continuum. Before the outbreak of the pandemic, physical immobility carried a negative connotation since it was considered a condition attributed to those in the lower professional and socioeconomic social strata. The negative connotation of physical immobility continued to persist during the crisis, but from yet another perspective, related to its rather imposed enforcement during lockdowns on all societal sectors. In post-COVID-19 times, numerous individuals, engaged in telework, may view free-will physical immobility as a rather blessed preference, following their positive experiences in this regard during the pandemic. The understanding of (im)mobility as a continuum carries a wider significance in that all individuals can be assumed to be subject to some constantly changing (im)mobility conditions, whether physical or digital. Thus, the relationship between mobility and immobility should be viewed as being like the relationship between mobility and fixity/sedentarity, in that both the mobile and the non-mobile conditions are there for most human beings, as normal conditions, at varying times.

In this chapter, we will attempt to speculate on possible future post-COVID-19 scenarios for personal mobilities, daily as well as touristic mobilities, following the wide availability of vaccinations against the virus. Post-COVID-19 mobilities reflect people's basic needs or triggers for mobilities, their pre-pandemic, and their pandemic mobility experiences, as well as some societal-economic forces pushing for mobility changes. We will speculate that habit formations by individuals for extensive uses of virtual mobilities, which have emerged during the COVID-19 crisis as a rather imposed sole mobility option, might continue also under more voluntary mobility conditions post-pandemic. These continued habitual changes will be relatively minor, in line with pre-pandemic trends, as far as mobility habits for shopping and social contacts are concerned. However, it is assumed that home-based work, which was selected only by small numbers of employers and employees during pre-pandemic times, may become widely adopted post-pandemic. Continued day-long stays at home for both work and domestic activities will turn homes for teleworkers into their only sites for daily activities, thus possibly bringing about demands for daily leisure activities to be pursued in local daily refreshment centers, alongside demands for more frequent periodical, international as well as domestic, touristic mobilities.

This article attempts to point to emerging future trends for personal mobilities, focusing on the current and upcoming uses of autonomous technologies for both physical and virtual mobilities. These uses will be based on electricity and the Internet, which also constitute mobility modes. The article presents first each of the four emerging mobility technologies: electric vehicles (EVs), mobile Internet, autonomous vehicles (AVs), and artificial intelligence (AI) via chatbots. This is followed by a discussion of habit changes in the adoption of the four new mobility technologies. The article then moves to discussions of individual, societal, and spatial implications of the two mobility autonomous technologies of AV and AI. For individuals, autonomous physical and virtual mobilities will both be typified by rather restricted roles and activities by users, such as passengers and text users respectively. At the social level autonomous mobility will have a major impact on education, both generally, requiring students to analyze texts rather than to author them, and professionally, with growing needs for computer experts rather than traditional garage workers. It is too early to assess some possible spatial impacts of chatbots, but AVs will imply several spatial implications, notably regarding the structure of urban streets and parking facilities.

In this thought-provoking book, Aharon Kellerman presents a wide-ranging understanding of personal mobilities; the mobilities which individuals initiate, direct, and operate physically and virtually and which constitute an expression of personal autonomy. He readdresses existing concepts and knowledge as well as assessing novel and emerging technologies for self-driven mobilities.

Social-spatial interaction constitutes basic human mobility. During modern pre-Internet times, the ability to maintain instant and online remote social ties was restricted by the petrifying powers of space and distance, both being unchallenged at the time by communications technologies, other than the rather limited fixed-line telephony, as of the twentieth century. Thus, it was for face-to-face communications to constitute the leading mode of social communication at the time, implying fewer albeit relatively rich exchanges. The introduction and adoption of the Internet has enabled individuals to enjoy the optionality of distance in the sense that the Internet has permitted the establishment of close and remote virtual ties with the same ease. However, individuals have still tended to establish and maintain spatially closer ties over remote ones, alongside the use of virtual communications. Hence, they revealed their continued preference for proximity to each other. The human need for physical proximity was obviously there already during pre-Internet times, as well, but it was hidden by the inexistence at the time of the alternative option of virtual communications, which also facilitate remote social ties.

The article portrays, first, the basic human requirements of physical and virtual spaces. Second, the article attempts to examine the relationships among the several basic human requirements of physical space, as well as the relationships between the requirements of physical space and those of virtual space. Third, the article suggests that the basic spatial requirements of individuals be examined in light of human spatial pulses, which include each person's fixed origin, a movement, and a fixed destination, with implications for people, their activities, and places. Discussions begin with the basic human requirements of physical space, fixity and mobility, and the human needs, which they present. This is followed by assessments of the relationships between these requirements, turning next to virtual space, attempting to expose the two human basic requirements of virtual space, access and connectivity, and the relationships between these two basic requirements. This is followed by an assessment of the relationships between the human requirements of physical and virtual spaces, and their implications for human activity. Finally, a joint interpretation of human spatial requirements and their activities, through the notion of human spatial impulses, is suggested.