Interesting to contrast two divergent, but reasonably complementary, responses to the latter-day fortunes of “non-place” as an idea: here’s my “On making non-place into place,” from October; here’s Kazys Varnelis’s “Goodbye, Supermodernism” from 2006.

Kazys – as befits a scholar of network culture – is interested primarily in how the particular style of consciousness associated with contemporary communication technology acts against or undoes the sense of characterless suspension Augé identified with his non-places. Whereas I’m primarily reacting to Augé’s definition being undermined by the unmediated experience of these same locales, sans iPod and PowerBook and Bose headset.

Probably of interest to a very few, but I find the difference in emphasis provocative, and maybe even productive.