The Online/Offline Distinction Will Dissolve
This paper argues that the internet typifies an ongoing restructuring of the social understanding of space and time, with regard to telecommunication, which grounds the offline/online distinction. Bernard Stiegler’s foundational concept of technics (re)frames the humanity-technology relationship as that which constitutes time via externalization of memory. This reframing initiates an investigation into how new age internet technologies recalibrate these spatiotemporal relations. Concepts such as ‘hybrid space’ go to show how space as a physical phenomenon begins to accord to digital programming, as seen with the case of locationally aware cell phones that organize and inform one’s approach to space. In Flusser’s notion of ‘technical image’ the linear historical time is supplanted by circular time. The last part of the paper is dedicated to Romeo Alquati’s notion of ‘valorizing information’ as a measurable economic exchange between human and machine that is objectified in the commodity.