Placelessness in our Postmodern Culture

Placelessness by Leslie Hill

The twentieth century was the first century without a frontier. A century of frontierlessness. Is the twenty-first century, then, the century of placelessness? The era when we lose our sense of place altogether – or transcend it? I grew up watching reruns of the original Star Trek and was,therefore, pretty sure that space was the final frontier, which suggested that we still had somewhere to go. But that project hasn’t really panned out like we thought it might – not a lot of us are homesteading outer space. Instead, we colonize cyberspace as if it is the only place left. Communication technology means that where you are geographically is now less important in many cases than what kind of material access you have to wireless technology. For many of us, being physically remote is less of an obstacle to our daily interactions than being without access to email and a cell phone would be. Does this, in turn, create a culture of placelessness? Cyberspace is perhaps the ultimate example of placelessness, a meeting place that is no place at all where
we spend ever increasing percentages of our time............. Very uncanny.