During my lunch stop I did read the Aether introduction by Tristan Thielmann. It did not solve my problems with the Elmer article, but I instantly become a fan of this article. When I started working with GPS in 2002 I had no clue that this medium would be part of something now revered to by Thielmann as the “Spatial Turn”. I love it! My work deals with something bigger called “Spacial Turn”…. This article put it all in a really nice broad perspective. And it is also very gentile if science can be that!
Some inspiring quotes that I copy pasted from the article:
“Nowadays everything gets tracked, tagged, and mapped. Cell phones have become location-aware, computer games have moved outside, the Web is tagged with geospatial information, and geobrowsers like Google Earth are regarded as an entirely new genre of media” (Parks 2009)
“This generation is becoming familiar with the fact that wherever we are on the planet corresponds with a latitude/longitude coordinate” (Varco 2004).
“Just as the music economy only blossomed once music was available as a “thing” to be bought on records, an image economy might blossom once images can be allocated to temporal and locally limited spatial resources and events. Scarcity plays a very central role in this, as is the case with all economic processes. Even if digital data can themselves never be scarce, which is the basis of the current crisis in the media economy, the spatial and temporal coordinates still create a region of scarcity within digital information. “ (Thielmann 2010)
I would just say anybody who it interested in locative Media or the media influence on Geography, just download this article and read it. Twice.