We live in a world of explosive change in information and communication technologies (ICTs). Companies advertise cell phone rates that
apply to calls anywhere within North America, trumpeting that North
America is now a single “neighbourhood.” E-mail puts us in touch with
friends and colleagues around the world as easily as it does with
neighbours or colleagues in the same department. We phone individuals
rather than, as in the past, a place, hoping that the person we are
calling is “home.” Home is where the cell is, and not the heart. Newsgroups create virtual communities unbounded by territory. In general,
ICTs appear to reduce dramatically the importance of geography,
territory and distance. Thus if “living in a place” is what really mattered
for identity in the recent past of Guterson's nove1, the scope and pace
of this technological change should have a profound effect on identities. Simply put, ICTs have the potential to erode, and erode rapidly,
the territorial foundations of our lives.