[...] When they remember the Starbucks where they met the one they married or the Gap where they lost the one they didn’t, they will be marinating in memories that happened everywhere but not somewhere, reliving experiences that are located in time but dislocated in space. And when they return to the places where they grew up, or went to school, or fell in love, they may not even notice that the Old Navy has been replaced by an Abercrombie, the Fridays by an Olive Garden and the once-fleeting past by an endless present.
Ours may be the last generation of Americans to suffer for return — to remember events that took place when place still mattered. So tonight let us revel in our nostalgia, and long for the days when longing was easy.
But those were the days when longing was dumb. But now we have the technology. Blogs, still cameras, video cameras, search engines, streaming video on our cell phones, social networks. All can gather or display data as we choose, all may be tagged and aggregated, all can help establish the context that makes memory meaningful, useful, not merely a source of pain but one of purpose. Fight the good and necessary fight when it comes to the brandification of the landscape, of course, but keep in mind what else we have, what else we can do with it.