[Dis]Temporality

Time has historically been thought of as an unstoppable linear progression, the flow that moves the universe. Increasingly, however, time has taken on qualities of space, becoming a "fourth dimension," and becoming mappable. The implications are that perhaps, like space, time can be entered freely and travelled in more than one direction.

The cyber- has taken time and further eroded its sense of progression. Time becomes a form of information, information that is meticulously and obsessively recorded so that moments in time can be recreated, understood and relived at will. People, places, and cultures can be archived, and the archive serves to reestablish connections between the past and the present. The archive when used within a cyberspace can even be the present, as one is navigating within information and can be looking at a simulation of a thousand-year-old object.

Another feature of time in cyber-environments is that information's linearity gets broken. Where hypermedia can create complexities of an Nth order, so can it make the temporality of these links inconsequential unless specified by the author. For example, these meditations which you are now reading happened during a real time, one before the other, but you are reading them hypertextually, contextually, and will never know which were written down first. These subjects are all interrelated under the heading of cybersophy, and therefore make time irrelevent.