The Creeping Virtuality of Place

Places are inherently dynamic. The boundaries of administrative regions (e.g., provinces and countries) and natural regions (e.g., coastlines, ecosystems, mountains, ice sheets, tectonic plates) can alter over time, as can their names. Cities have a daily influx and egress of people and vehicles, buildings go up and down, streets sometimes get repaired, added, etc. Even when a place persists, its geographical constituents may change. Some of this information is clearly more volatile than the rest. Places also mediate between entities and events of significance to us, and space. As a result, places have a subjective quality. They reflect a network of associations, involving landmarks deemed salient for various reasons. These are all properties assigned to a place by a speaker, and may or may not correspond to the properties assigned to a place by any other speaker. The psychological maps of Milgram (1976) reflect this subjectivity, as do contemporary social-network based maps, e.g., TagMaps.