ABSTRACT
The myth of the global village assumes that modern man’s place in the world has little or no relevance to his identity. It used to be that a man was described as the son of so-and-so, from the place X. Then his vocation was enumerated; that is to say, he was “placed” in a threefold manner: personally, topographically, and culturally. Today, in the tech nological society, the tendency is to homogenize the globe with one artificial culture, the place becoming immaterial and the assumption being that the job defines a man’s identity. No wonder the quintessence of the technological society, the city, is described by Harvey Cox1 and others as marked by anonymity and mobility, the source of anomie and human anxiety. Edward Relph in his interesting study of Place and Placelessness defines the modern phenomenon of “placelessness” as the weakening of the identity of places by the powerful processes of tech nology, such as outer-rather than inner-directedness, uniformity, stan dardization, impermanence, and destruction.2 Thus we are witnessing whole landscapes of city and suburbia processed and manufactured by techne today.
