Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology

Volume 17, Issue 2, Spring 2013

Distance and Presence in Analogue and Digital Epistolary Networks

This paper considers the particular ways in which the familiar letter (for thousands of years the predominant means of communicating over distance) and twenty-first century technologies like the Internet differingly shaped and shape our experience of distance and presence. It follows Heidegger, Dreyfus, and Borgmann in critiquing the kinds of experience and action the Internet makes possible, and—by way of Benjamin’s concept of “aura”—argues that while mediated communication over distance might have never been easier, faster, or cheaper, this increase in our effective power comes at the cost of a diminution of the affective power of the messages carried.