No Sense of Place
I’ve been looking at ‘No Sense of Place’ by Joshua Meyrowitz. A fantastic and well written book on the effects that new forms of media have in shaping our perception of places and the relationship between all sorts of different people in a society.
“a television is like a new doorway to the home and through it rush many welcome and unwelcome visitors. Television and its visitors take children across the globe before parents give them permission to cross the street.” (Meyrowitz 1995)
Meyrowitz proposes that electronic media has an amalgamating effect on places and culture. It seperates the physical spaces we inhabit; the school, the home, the workplace, from the people we meet and the social activities that can take place.
Before telephone, radio, tv and the internet, you could only talk with someone if you shared the same space, control money by visiting the bank, do shopping by entering a shop etc. These activities no longer have a ‘place’ in which they occur.
If you wanted to see a politican you would have to visit him at some venue making a speech and even then you would probably only see him at a distance, Now they are broadcast into our homes at larger than life sizes. Despite being recorded, transmitted and recreated we still claim to have ‘seen’ the person or event that is playing on our screens. It doesn’t matter if it happened 4000 miles away or even if it happened 4 days ago, it is recreated for us here and now. What is happening anywhere in the world can be happening wherever we are. “Yet when we are everywhere, we are in no place in particular” – Meyrowitz
“Nothing can be further from the spirit of the new technology than “a place for everything and everything in it’s place”“ – Marshall McLuhan