Place vs. Technology

After telling a friend about my experiences interviewing graduates of Superior’s old Central High School, she was surprised to learn of how much those graduates care about their alma mater.

“I don’t care about my high school,” she said.

While I have memories of my Alma mater, I can’t say I would be completely upset it was to be torn down. I might be bummed briefly but the feelings I have for my old school are transient. So what makes me different from people like Marlene Case who graduated from Central High School in 1952 and says that students now don’t have the same school pride that students had in her day?

I suggest that the new age of media and technology is what accounts for my generation’s lack of connection to the physical world, and the older generation’s deep connection to place.

In the article “The Declining Significance of Space and Geography,” Jeffrey Henig and Frederick Hess suggest, “new educational technologies make space and place less relevant,” (60).

So as we continue to add layers of data over the physical world, we start to lose track of where we are in a geographical sense. As we build communities and learning environments around a dimension and not geography, we begin to lose touch with the physical world.

It makes sense. Most of my interactions don’t occur in the flesh; they are communicated through Email, social networking sites and mobile devices. Even while I am in class I can stay plugged in to the virtual world be means of new technology. Because we can be in more than one place at time, single places become less relevant; places like Superior’s old Central High School.

Now it’s easy to see where conflict occurs. When buildings have housed people from generations old an new, many perspectives of those buildings exist: Central High School probably means a lot more to a graduate from the 1950’s than it does to a graduate of the 2000’s. But how do we balance the differing sentiments of generations? The truth is, we can’t; they will constantly be budding up against each other in an old-world-new-world contention.