A Good Connection

I was recently reading my text book for City Life: City Life Reader. The article I was reading was entitled Urbanism as a Way of Life by Louis Wirth. I noticed that at one point Wirth talked about one of the ideas that Neil Postman talked about in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death. The idea was that humans are becoming slaves to the clock. I talk about Postman's idea in more detail in my blog "Boring Ourselves to Death". Wirth touches on this idea when he states that "The clock and the traffic signal are symbolic of the basis of our social order in the urban world." Even when talking about two totally different subjects, authors can make connections through their ideas. Wirth talks about how the clock and traffic signal are symbolic because we always need to be moving, and if we're not it can give rise to loneliness. This idea also connects to Canadian Society today as well. We are constantly being bombarded by advertisements and when they're not there we actually start to get bored because we're so used to seeing them.
There is also a part in Wirth's article that relates to the novel Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. McCloud talks about closure and how our brains can see only part of the whole picture but still know what the whole picture is. For example, BR DGE. Our brain sees only five of the six letters yet we still know it says "bridge". This is closure in terms of the media, but closure is different when talking about the city. When Wirth talks about closure in the city by saying that "There is little opportunity for the individual for to obtain a conception of the city as a whole or to survey his place in the total scheme." In this case, one can't obtain closure about what the city is as a whole or what their purpose is there. I thought it was really interesting how the same word can have totally opposite meaning when used in a different context.