We have so far seen how a visceral way of knowing place, often held by the least privileged groups in Western industrialised societies like the UK and the United States, describes the need for an intuitive and deeply ingrained level of knowledge about your surroundings – it is knowing people and place but in a deep- seated sense. It is more than just knowing of somebody or of a place (that might be useful in ‘getting ahead’, for example), rather, it is knowing the very essence of a person or place, in a way that you can intuitively know what will happen next – there is none of the ‘unexpected’ in a visceral knowing. This was juxtaposed in with an instrumental connectedness that is only concerned with what you can get out of people or places; what they symbolise in status terms, and in contributing to a person's identity – a way of relating to place more often held by the most privileged. When you are instrumentally connected, you are only concerned with the objective goods and resources people and place afford access to. A deep- seated knowing of Chapter 4 people and place, in a truly authentic sense, does not matter here.

These two opposing ways of relating to geographic places go hand in hand with how people understand the purpose of social connections in their lives – and ultimately the kinds of networks they develop, the role these play and how these are utilised. When people hold a visceral way of knowing place, the places they can imagine living are entirely dependent on the geographic location of their social networks – their social networks are in effect their maps of the world in terms of places that ‘exist’ to them.