Nigel Th rift has developed the most compelling call for a mobile
ontology and epistemology in geography over time. He labels a particularly
(post) modern structure of feeling mobility.73 Mobility, to Th rift , is
a structure of feeling that emerged with modernity and has attained new
characteristics as we approached the twenty-fi rst century. Th e focus of his
argument is on developing technologies and “machine complexes” starting
with the stage coach and ending (provisionally) with the Internet. By
the end of the twentieth century, developments in speed, light, and power
had reached such a point that they had combined and fused with people to
produce a kind of cyborg, which changed everything. Toward the end of
his essay he lays out some of the consequences of this structure of feeling
for human geography, one of which concerns place.