Technospaces: inside the new media

Abstract

Human knowledge passes through two forms of cognition before it can be conceived: space and time. These two forms can be described as intuitive, in the sense that they precede conscious awareness - in other words, we know that, before we experience things, we will perceive them as phenomena in space and time, which are the first filters of knowledge. The eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant made an important distinction between 'the thing itself' and 'the thing for me': of the former, we cannot obtain prior and certain knowledge; of the latter, we accept that any knowledge we have is fundamentally organized by space and time. To put it another way, humans cannot conceive of their existence outside of space and time; therefore, to continue with Kant, space is a practical postulate - something that has to be assumed for the sake of 'praxis', or practice. To illustrate, astronomers argue that the universe is infinite and endless, an idea which to humans is inconceivable, something we cannot imagine, and hence cannot know. In deploying space and time in human knowledge we use notions of relativity, i.e., objects are here or there, moments are now or then. These practices are referential in the sense that we know that something is, because of the thing that it is not.

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