In an age where we have come to easily understand time in a format that is anything but linear, one is often forced to draw parallels between simultaneous happenings across the globe. This easy sense of the quick ebb and flow of information is natural to a contemporary ten year old on the internet. Last fall on a flight to Chicago I heard a young college student behind me exclaim, “Oh shit! I forgot the GPS!” His companion, equally exasperated responded, “Oh no! How are we going to know where to go?” They kept repeating this over and over to one another until one finally realized, “Oh. I can just google-text for the phone number, call the place and get directions.” The concept of stopping at an airport store and consulting a map was entirely inconceivable to these early twenty-somethings. Not only had information itself fractured and changed, but the way we go about getting it has as well.

As I perused the readings, I found myself looking for a common link between them. What I found was that they all deal with human perception and the fragmentation of spaces—whether they are real three-dimensional spaces, depicted spaces or ideological spaces. The movement away from things that are whole and solid to realms that oscillate between here and there is reflected as easily in the loss of space between starting point and destination caused by railroad tracks as it is in Postmodern Art where there is a rejection of the single truth, or the concept of the lone artist genius in a vacuum. The readings I found to be most interesting (on a pure level of pleasure from reading) were the Schivelbusch readings, because they illustrated in an entertaining and informative way the psychological shifts that human beings underwent when confronted with an invention of monstrous consequences.