place and time

tags: travel, place
date: August 08, 2013 07:22:12 PM
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Places beckon us to experience them, and ourselves as through them. But one wonders whether our lives are not now headed towards being carried out on some other plane of existence: today, as a marketing analyst notes in the trade journal Advertising Age, young consumers are interested in digital technology that “allows [them] to transcend time and place.”

It is this aspiration that we find frustrated when we speak today of feeling “disconnected”: we mean we are disconnected not from the place where we are standing, but from that realm of virtual transcendence, that place that is no place. Hence we want access to it wherever we go — we demand (and increasingly get) wireless connectivity even in places far and wild, at campgrounds and national parks and remote destinations. And yet at the same time we strangely speak of the thrill of “disconnecting for a while” — as if disconnecting is required for reconnecting.

If feeling “connected” for us means inhabiting the virtual realm, then what we most long to connect to is not what is in front of our eyes. When we speak of feeling “disconnected,” then, we are confessing that we have become displaced: we are losing interest in and forgetting how to inhabit real places on their own. This displacement produces restlessness — but of a very different sort than the restlessness that motivates the traveler to go forward into the world. In fact, this restlessness is opposed to the traveler’s impulse: it seeks its relief not in the real world but the virtual. It is not like what Percy’s traveler to Chicago feels — for his anxiety is of the place, over who he might be there, whether he might emerge from it changed, and the risks of what that newness might mean. Rather, our anxiety is based in having disengaged from this realm of possibilities, but finding ourselves nonetheless left with the task of figuring out how to be in the world.

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/gps-and-the-end-of-the-road