Technological Advancements and Distortion of Notion of Place

Abstract

Technological advancements now extend to mobility, place, and memory adding new complexity to the notion of place and space. Place now considered as an important concept in the context of technology adoption and the usage of data services. There is need to understand the ontology in both the digital and physical space. The aim of this paper is to propose a new extended model to analyse the ontological determinants of physical and digital space and to gain insight into the new experiences and the usage behaviour of data services. An extended model of place was generated, adopting the humanistic geographical perspective as represented by Tuan's theory, which can be served as a sensitizing device in order to interpret and analyse the collected data. The proposed extended model can assist designers, developers and researchers to understand users' experiences when interacting with their surrounding environment (physical and virtual) when adopting new technologies and using data services.