While the previous chapters discussed the internet and online journalism at the macro level, this chapter will provide a brief account of the relationship between the net and its users at a deeper level – that of space and time. This will be addressed as part of the general area of culture and subjectivity.

The reference to ‘relationship’ actually is an approximation, because the net and its users are not separate entities. The computer network that constitutes the net's physical layer requires the insertion of users to become the internet as we know it, as distinct from a collection of inert machines. Equally, users become what they are, distinct from people in general, because of the net.

The real question then is not of ‘relationship’ but of something that is best expressed in the language of phenomenology as the net's ‘being in and with’ its users and vice versa. In this perspective, the media, including the internet, are part of the ‘lifeworld’ of the individual, whose existence cannot be meaningfully seen in isolation from this lifeworld.

The Network Paradigm

Chapters ten and eleven dealt with certain socially significant facts about the net, which were treated as loosely connected but more or less discrete. In recent years, however, scholars treating society and the net holistically have produced a body of literature on the so-called ‘network society’ or ‘networked society’.

Even as networks have become ubiquitous, Thacker notes, this paradigm has entered scientific thinking in several disciplines, including biology, technology, military studies and political studies.