Dispossessed of their place. About the audio-visuality of a town and the problems with the identity of its inhabitants at the beginning of the XXI century Cover Image

Wywłaszczeni z miejsca. O audiowizualności miasta i problemach z tożsamością jego mieszkańców na początku XXI w.
Dispossessed of their place. About the audio-visuality of a town and the problems with the identity of its inhabitants at the beginning of the XXI century

Author(s): Adam Regiewicz
Subject(s): Anthropology, Communication studies
Published by: Instytut Nauk o Kulturze i Studiów Interdyscyplinarnych - Wydział Filologiczny - Uniwersytet Śląski
Keywords: place; city; loneliness; disposses

Summary/Abstract: Seeing sets our place in the surrounding world about which the ubiquitous screens convince a modern inhabitant: LED displays, monitors of the video games, cash machines, MP4 players etc. Located in the iconosphere of a town, the screens constitute a new space causing "loss of a place and projection". A screen image is an alternative text to the first reality and it is simulated, received more tangibly than visually which causes a new sense of space, based not on the territory but on the community in the picture transmission. A screen ceases to engage a passer-by and becomes an indication of a non-place which Marc Augé characterises through: the exchange of the place for anthropological space, uncertainty of the materialisation of space and the primacy of vision over the experience of space. Non-places do not create identity or relations, but only similarity and loneliness. The plane of the "meeting" is the consumerism attitude, and an identity based on a continuous consumption might be called transparent.

  • Issue Year: 2015
  • Issue No: 24
  • Page Range: 10-21
  • Page Count: 12
  • Language: Polish