No more and no less. We can learn from them and pander to them and we can probably turn a good buck as a result. It's a good time to sell alarm systems, high-tech entertainment modules, digital phones and airline tickets. But from a human perspective, a world devoid of place is a painful place to live. Frequent flying turns places into destinations and lay-overs.
Human beings can forge a strong link with a place.
Our distant ancestors recognized this conjunction of person and place as deities and spirits, mountain gods, goddesses of the springs and lakes, and so forth. One of the main ways we connect with a place, with the earth, is to walk on it. We used to walk a great deal more, but the scale of the automobile city where most of us live doesn't encourage that. In his book, City Life, architect Witold Rybczynski notes that cities were once of a scale that could more easily be traversed. Now they sprawl, encouraging us to get into the car to get around.