Living in the City: An Introduction (2022)
Visual essay

Part 0 of Life in Transition.

Technology has changed our way of living and our relationships at every level. Today, technology is not just a symbol of productivity and instrumentality, it is also a kind of global culture: it has become a symbol of prestige, safety, and sociality. At the same time, we are emotionally attached to our cell phones, we keep us “constantly in touch”. Information and communication have drawn us into a river that needs to constantly "update ourselves" and "catch up with the latest technology", the attempts to resist the intrusion of technology into our everyday life only result in further alienation.

As urbanization, industrialization, and capitalism swept across the globe, in the world of strutural unemployment no one can feeltruely irreplaceable. Distrust of the future has led many people to start using an instant gratification strategy to get a promise of certainty. People live a fast life with immediate consumption, like a clever wanderer, traveling lightly anywhere in order to get out of bad situations in a timely manner. Therefore travelers seldom pause long enough to muse. This is the era of instantaneity.

In the online world, people have the illusion of freedom, think they can choose their own identity, to become different. But pop culture shapes people‘s minds to become what they want us to be, tapping into the desire to feel good about ourselves, accepted, and attractive. At the same time, our entanglements with mass media will have on remembering and forgetting. Memory has been lost to the hyperconnected illusion of an open-access world of the availability, accessibility, and reproducibility of the past. Given that there are few online communities (e.g. SNS communities) has “heritage park” allow us to go back and nostalgia - most sites becomes 404 not found. Contemporary life is typically segmented to a very high degree. People's life increasingly does not overlap with their friends and family. This has accelerated our fragmented, incoherent and cross-cultural identity crisis. Many people are lost in a state of spiritual homelessness.