In this piece in the Guardian from about a year ago, Jim McClellan offers a succint summary of locative media, one that also resonates with the core interests of my dissertation project:

When the net first went mainstream, people talked up cyberspace as some sort of alternative global space, a new frontier where distance was dead and you were free to associate with like minds around the world. Where you were in the real world wasn’t supposed to be that important.

Now, things are beginning to move in the opposite direction. People are beginning to see that location is important and that linking the net to the real world may open up all sorts of interesting possibilities. A location-enhanced web will get people out of the house and give them new ways to interact with the world around them. The net might be a tool for localisation as much as for globalisation. That’s the dream.