Nice start. Trust the french to come up with obscure/impenetrable terms for relatively intuitive concepts

2 related thoughts occur to me. One is that ‘place’ is often distinguished from ‘non-place’ by whether or not people are moving relative to each other. Airports confuse that because the big moving objects (planes) are truer ‘places’ because there is no relative movement. Ditto for trains and junctions. My definition of place/non-place relies on a definition of social agent.

The second is related to social objects. I’ve been developing thoughts around how virtualization destroys walls, and gets social groups to form around social objects instead of within walls. Don’t know if you saw the (long and rambling) piece.

One of the things that I concluded in that piece was that in airports, “flight delays” are the social object. That’s the only thing that turns the non-place into a place, and waiting people talking to each other. Along with, of course, frequent-flyer clubs where George Clooney can hook up with Vera Farmigia … incidentally, it’s known, I believe, that people talk a lot more in first class.

Venkat