How has the internet affected our sense of space?

This was originally posted as a "viewpoint" at Aeon Conversations

The internet has undoubtedly narrowed the spread of our geographic space. But does all this automatically translate to the world becoming better place, us better people?

French Historian Fernand Braudel divided time into three scales: geographic, social (or sociological) and individual. We could apply such a triune categorisation to space too. We refer to geographic space when we say New York is around 10,000 miles from Sydney. Social space could refer to any space (more metaphoric than physical) that separates groups of humans from each other, be they family units, clans, ethnic groups, nation states or other artificial collections. Individual space is (more or less) what we commonly call personal space (my car, my house, my money).

Murrumbidgee Rice Farm (CSIRO, 1991, Creative Commons)

The internet has undoubtedly narrowed the girth of our geographic space and has helped us overcome “the tyranny of distance” that Geoffrey Blainey once worried about. The world has in a way become s single neighbourhood and we have instant knowledge of what our neighbours are doing (and vice versa). If we are concerned about the other’s well-being, we can express it so much more quickly. But this ability to bring the world within reach has its downsides too. Whether it is our neighbours across the fence or across the world are we comfortable with them seeing us in our undies? And the more we flaunt our linen (dirty or otherwise) the more we are “exposing” ourselves to crime and, much worse, terrorism. The internet in that respect is like the Wild West where both the tired and ageing Sheriff and the trigger-happy highwayman are competing for the same laissez-faire territory and its abundance of arms.

With respect to social and individual spaces too the way the internet has influenced space and our lives is double-edged: on the one hand, most of us need not rely on snail mail anymore; we have instead email, Skype and social media. We can therefore be in touch 24/7 if we wish to. But, on the other hand, there will always be those who may spend twenty hours a day on social media but couldn’t be bothered (or unable) to converse with their kin face to face.

In the end, the internet is like the “tide in the affairs of men,” that Brutus refers to (in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar) that “taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.” But if we do not use technology wisely the “voyage” of our lives may be “bound in shallows and in miseries.”