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May 14, 2005
It is commonly held that in postmodernity the everyday and space are somehow out of kilter, either because the built environment has not taken account of history or because we modern subjects have forgotten how to connect to history.
On the first point the argument is that the car has destroyed the nineteenth century city by invading it.The city has been transformed for the car (freeways, suburbs, commercial strips, car parks, petrol fumes, noise etc) and the people friendly city has been lost. The new urban landscapes are being redesigned by urban planners for the car. this remaking of urban landscapes erodes our understanding of ourselves and our identity in trying to dwell in the postmodern city.
On the second point the argument is that the built space has eroded our connection with history through a process of 'disembedding' whereby we have been, as it were, evicted from the world. We late baby boomer moderns have not changed to keep pace with the postmodern times and we find the contemporary world dizzying. We were formed in an age whose coordinates were different to the rapid changes in a digitalized postmodernity (eg., since the 1980s the world being formed by mobile phones, internet, email, sensory overload, etc); and we find ourselves immersed in images that lack depth. It is a world of mobility not roots.
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I am not a baby boomer, and my formative years in the twenties were indulged by the new processes of fluidity courtesy of the decentralised data network, yet I still sometimes find it fast.
Fast, but fun. No way of going back for me, I am far too immersed in the current way of living to every return to how I recall life as a teenager with only the TV and books. Much more fun being a content creator, than a content consumer.