f2f 2 url & bond: space/time and the dissemination of community

Abstract

This paper addresses a simple question: what is space/time in an age of converged media? The rapid development of mobile networks of mediation has expanded the notion of ambiguous presence associated with the internet and other telematic networks. This paper seeks to review this expansion of telepresence in the context of residual debates to do with centre and periphery, town and country, urban and regional. It also seeks to critically examine questions to do with identity that arise from distributed networks and the modes of largely text based, abbreviated discourse they engender. Do such networks promote collective ideals of community, consistent with the rhetoric associated with the age of “new media”? Or do they distribute or disseminate the very notion of community to such a degree that the opposite is true? Are we witnessing the rise of a new individualism?