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ene in the temporality of our relations.
Because communications media enable us to stretch our relationships across time and space (by framing the possibilities of our interactions), they inform and even produce our proximity to one another. These proximities involve rhythms of interaction, activity coordination, ways of communicating, and ways of offering or protecting our availability to each other. They put us into a kind of virtual immediacy with respect to our access and presence to each other. We become virtually equidistant to one another.
Proximity, commonly measured as a physical field in which persons are distributed in space, also unfolds temporally, as duration. We can think of proximity as a distribution of relations in a spatial sense, and an intensification in a temporal sense.
Unlike physical proximity, whose distances are extensive, or spatial, the distances that characterize temporal proximity are intensive. They can be described as having qualities (not quantities) of speed, duration, acceleration, rhythm, and synchroni...