Place, Non-Place, and Cyberspace free essay sample

The places we knew, may not be places anymore, things that are were made three years ago, are considered old, and we as human beings have been faced with a whole new world called cyberspace. In a way, this can all be very daunting and scary at times however, I believe that there is also a beauty to it, a hidden tint of silver lining to this grey cloud we call the 21st century world. In the up coming pages, a place, a non-place, and cyberspace will be defined, analyzed, and identified in the places we have seen throughout this master in Siena, Italy.Place As we winded our way through ancient streets, we came to a place that many of us had passed and not thought twice about the significance of It. We sat on the stairs that Dante himself sat on. This specific place was the Chaise did San Crisscross, which was the ancient public place in the 10th-I lath centuries, and is now one of the many churches in Siena. As we sat on these steps, the mind tries to wrap itself around the fact that Dante himself sat on these steps. That in a sense it is the same place where lions of people have sat before us, yet the place stays the same. The stairs have not been altered, the church has not been moved or remodeled to a great extent, the place we sit, is the same physical place that Dante sat and wrote, read, and thought. However, in the article Non-places, Introduction to an Anthropology of Super modernity, Marc Gauge says, Same things apply to the non-place as to the place. It never exists in pure form; places reconstitute themselves in it; relations are restored and resumed In it; (p. 78) I find this interesting, and at first hard to fully understand, UT reading other articles on this topic, It has become easier to understand the beauty of the definition.In the opening chapter of The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture (Low : Lawrence-Gauzing deed. 2003) it says that this interest in space and place is not accidental; it is necessary for understanding the world we are producing.. . (21 and I could not agree more with this quote. Just like all things, the definition of an anthropological place has changed over the many years. The French anthropologist Marc Gauge defined the first in 1995. Gauge wrote that place, can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with Identity (p. 7). In 2007 barbells : Bridge redefined an anthropological place using Gaugegs deflation as a starting point and said that, places are filled with individual identities, language, references, unformulated rules. .. (p. 3). Place, according to both definitions, is still a stabilizing factor for an individual and his or her identity. However, the place itself is viewed in two different lights, one as a stable material location, and the other as a hafting and currently redefined entity In virtual or real life.Nor-Place Just like all things, a place has an opposite, and that is the non-place. Gauge describes it that place and non-place are rather like opposed polarities; the first is never completely erased, the second never totally completed; they are like palimpsests on which the scrambled game of Identity and relations Is ceaselessly prevalent. If we know what a place is, then in the words of Gauge then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non place. (p. Gauge is clear that non-place, like place, is never pure.In other words, it is not that the airport cannot ever be a place, but that to the extent it becomes a place, it ceases being an airport. It may be a place of residence (for someone using its nooks and crannies as a place to live), or a place of work, and in that sense it may hold symbolic meaning. Clearly the word non-place designates two complementary but distinct realities: spaces formed in relation to certain ends (transport, transit, commerce, leisure), and the relations that individuals have wit h these spaces. (p. 94). Everywhere in the 21st century, has multiple non- places and they are multiplying as time goes by.As we moved from the steps that are a place in Siena, we walked just ten minutes maybe less, and we were at a non-place, the escalators. Here from walking and being humans, we stood, and became some what less human, we were not humans, we were a thing, we were not consumers, we were not students, we were, nothing. When I was on the steps, I felt a certain feeling about where I was, and astonishing feeling. The fact that I was at the same place that Dante was only undressed and hundreds of years later, it leaves an incredible feeling in ones person. However, when I was walking down those escalators, I had no feeling towards where I was, and how it made me feel, there was no feeling towards where I was. When walking through Siena you get used to being surrounded by incredible architecture, art, and monuments, but when we are in a non-place, you automatically have nothing to say, nothing to feel. You are not human, you are in a non-place, and you are nothing. Cyberspace. We have defined place and non-place we have been to both in Siena, yet one mains, the definition of cyberspace, and where to find it.In the 21st century, Cyberspace has been invented and has taken over. But first we must define this thing called cyberspace before we talk about what it has done to the world, and what it means to the world today. The author William Gibson is quoted to say that cyberspace is an evocative and essentially meaningless thing. According to Chip Mornings and F. Randall Farmer, who are both authors and software designers, cyberspace is defined more by the social interactions involved rather than its technical implementation.In their view of this word, and world, the computational medium in cyberspace is an augmentation of the communication channel between real people; the core characteristic of cyberspace is that it offers an environment that consists of many participants with the ability to affect and influence each other. They derive this concept from the observation that people seek richness, complexity, and depth within a virtual world. However, thinking about how people seek richness and depth in a virtual world, means that they are seeking these things, not in the real world.Does that mean that it is real? When entering the word cyberspace into the dictionary, one will be presented with the de finition of The electronic medium of a cyber space, are we truly the people we are in the world, face to face? One can lose, add, or change the identity of his or her person, in cyberspace, which means that you as a person are gone. In another sense, you yourself are not talking to another person, you are talking to a screen, and the person is not there. But when people know that people are not real people in this space, why is it so popular in this world of ours?I believe the reason why it is so popular is because anyone can be anyone or anything they want. If you want to be different then you are, the thought of succeeding in the cyberspace, becoming someone else, it is an alternate world, an alternate and other you, a different you. Nowadays, in the so-called information society, information is described as the best value: a perfect human being would be a free brain directly connected to the web, and without a body because it is considered as an impediment to the circulation of information. But what is considered as good today wont be good enough tomorrow.And improving the human being more and more could make it evolve into a very different human being, or even into a new species: post-humankind. For some pe ople, this is not a problem, because the goal is to be better than we are, human or not. But I do not agree with this, because I believe that cyberspace is making us lose something very important, social ability and social interactions. To be able to speak to someone face to face, to be able to make mistakes is how people learn. Yet with a cyberspace, and this dream to always be connected one can lose things when always connected.