There is a type of spatial discontinuity that arises when social grammars have no tie to a particular location, so that their activities can be carried on most anywhere.
This has always been true for some actions. The expectations governing informal conversations seldom specify any particular location or special way to use space; we can carry on these conversations on a staircase, in a swimming pool, in the forest. There are cultural expectations about appropriate topics, about how close one should stand to the other, and so on, but these will not be tied to any particular location.
Joshua Meyerowitz argues that this kind of placeless action has increased lately, and at the same time our new media are breaking down the isolation of formerly separated social situations. Social separations that depended on restrictions on information flows cannot be maintained. One effect is a growth of social settings divorced from any geographical place. He sees this as hearkening back to earlier hunter-gatherer of life.
Like hunters and gatherers who take for granted the abundance of food "out there" and therefore only hunt and gather enough to consume immediately, we are increasingly becoming a "subsistence information society." Rather than engage in long-term storage of knowledge in their memories or homes, many people are beginning to believe that information is available "out there" and that individuals do not need to stockpile it. . . . The connections found are often consumed and digested immediately without being painstakingly linked to other knowledge and ideas. . . . Many of the features of our "information age" make us resemble the most primitive of social and political forms: the hunting and gathering society. As nomadic peoples, hunters and gatherers . . . have little "sense of place"; specific activities and behaviors are not tightly fixed to specific physical settings. . . . electronic media create new types of social situations that transcend physically defined social settings and have their own rules and role expectations. (Meyerowitz 1985, 315-17, 333)
While I am impressed by this analogy, I suspect that many social settings that seem without place actually do have normative but spatially discontinuous places.
(c) David Kolb, 1 August 2001