The Redefinition of Presence

What is present? Traditional notions of presence entail proximity and accessibility and yet the electronic world is not governed by physical space. What is existent is yet not accessible. Nothing is spatially proximate, nor is there physical proximity. The world of hypertext is reduced to hyperlinks, so that all existence is virtual. "Electronic texts have no body, only mind." (Florian Brody "The Medium is the memory" in The Digital Dialectic)

So what is the blog? The printing press brought the audiences of the world to the author's fingertips. Suddenly there was a medium to reach the masses and so the term "reading public" was coined. The world wide web brings the authors of the world to the reader's fingertips, and the Glutenberg Revolution is complete. Every text, whose author has been dead at least 20 years, is available digitally. The entire corpus of Old English, Middle English and Classical Latin and Greek texts are available with a click.

The printing press gave birth to Libraries but information is still not available. O Brave New World saturated with knowledge. The public world may resemble Orwell's fear of surveillence, but the digital world has realised the overload of information. Are google's sidebar ads and the relentless pop-ups any less sinister than brainwashing whispers in our sleep?