a canonical example she pointed to an advertisement that seems simple, a photograph of the iconic French actress Catherine Deneuve juxtaposed with a bottle of perfume (Chanel No. 5), encouraging us to bind to the perfume the association of class and beauty people of a certain age might associate with Catherine Deneuve. Meaning has been shifted from one semantic network (the realm of actresses) to another (a brand of perfume).

LBA has the potential to perform a similar sleight-of-mind, causing us to exchange the meaning we associate with a place for one suggested by an ad. Moreover, this location-based semantic shift is taking place through ads delivered to a device that can track the individual. This raises two new privacy issues: The first is that LBA has the potential to be a feedback system with dynamic control. The advertiser can present an ad when one is near a target location, then track that person to determine whether the ad has had the desired response. In the language of Gilles Deleuze, 8 the advertiser can observe the response to the information stream presented to the individual, then “modulate,” or refine, that stream over time, driving the individual to a desired state of behavior; in this case, movement to and consumption at the target location. Primitive examples of modulation fueled by click-tracking can be seen by an aware observer of the Web. If one fails to produce the desired response to a pop-up window, other windows offer alternatives on behalf of the advertiser. Second, unlike click-tracking, LBA exploits consumers’ physical location, attempting to manipulate their relationship to their physical surroundings. The following highlights the potential for a more insidious form of manipulation at an entirely new level of psychological conditioning.

Philosophy of place. Many people view geography as the study of locations and facts; for example, “Jackson is the capital of Mississippi” is the stuff of geography, as is the shape and size of the Arabian Peninsula. However, in the 1970s, humanistic geographers began to move the field toward a consideration of “place” as more than a space or location, beyond latitude, longitude, and spatial extent. 7 In an oft-quoted

the more that
can be done within
the handset and
kept within
the handset,
the greater
the preservation
of anonymity.

definition, the geographer and political philosopher John Agnew defined place as consisting of three things1:

Location. “Where,” as defined by, say, latitude and longitude;

Locale, or the shape of the space. Shape may include defining boundaries (such as walls, fences, and prominent geographical features like rivers and trees); and

Sense. One’s personal and emotional connections established through location and locale.

Place is thus a location to which
one ascribes meaning. The process by
which meaning attaches to place, and
the importance of this process to the
individual and to society, have become
a prime focus for humanistic geogra-
phers. One aspect of it builds on the
work of the phenomenologists. Phe-
nomenology, generally associated with
the German philosopher Franz Bren-
tano and the Austrian philosopher
Edmund Husserl, studies the struc-
tures of consciousness. Phenomenol-
ogy proceeds by first bracketing-out
our assumptions of an outside world,
then focusing on our experience of the
world through our perception. Phe-
nomenologists study consciousness by
focusing on human perception of phe-
nomena, hence the name.i
Brentano is credited with one of the
key results of the phenomenologist ap-
proach. In his 1874 book Psychology
from an Empirical Standpoint,j he said
one of the main differences between
mental and physical phenomena is
the former has intentionality; that is,
it is about, or directed at, an object,
or one cannot be conscious without
being conscious of something. In the
latter part of the 20th century, human-
istic geographers took this philosophy
a step further; in his 1976 book Place
and Placelessness, Edward Relph as-
serted that consciousness could only
be about something in its place, mak-
ing place “profound centers of human
existence.” 23

Another thread in the philosophy of i For a quick look at the field see http://plato. stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/ and for more detail Sokolowski, R. Introduction to Phenomenology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U. K., 1999.