At the turn of the twentieth century the notion of time became radicalized. The invention
and implementation of new means of transportation made travel quick and efficient, enabling
people to roam swiftly around the world by boat, train, plane, and automobile. The rapid spread
of new media in print, film, and radio made information travel at an unforeseen speed. The rise
of mass urbanization and technologies led people to compartmentalize time, schedules,
movement, and communication. These drastic changes in modern American life brought about
new perceptions concerning the concept of time and experience. Walter Kalaidjian writes,
“Multiplicity, diversity, complexity, anarchy and chaos could…be mapped as defining rubrics
across the contemporaneous fields of culture, aesthetics, and politics of the modern American
age; they aptly describe the social experience of the new masses coming together in the
cosmopolitan urban centers of modern American big city life” (2). With this wave of change at
the dawn of the century, the idea of time as a chronological succession with clear-cut instances is
dismantled and a new paradigm emerges: time, memory, and experience as a heterogeneous
whole.