Place, Non-Place, and Cyberspace
In this day and age, time is moving ever so quickly. 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 semester 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 Chiesa di San Cristoforo, which was the ancient public place in the 10th-11th 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 millions 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 Augé 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, but 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-Zuniga ed. 2003) it says that “this interest in space and
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 Chiesa di San Cristoforo, which was the ancient public place in the 10th-11th 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 millions 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 Augé 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, but 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-Zuniga ed. 2003) it says that “this interest in space and