This text is coded, its digital impulse it’s a long formation that we’re not able to read. Its intensities, line breaks and reiterations are others; they belong to a sphere of signals that we don’t recognize, first, because we only see its barbaric digits in the event of a misreading—its fluidity broken—and secondly, because its code is a pulse and not a sign. It’s a computation that carries instructions to be perceived by a machine. Closer to the way we recognize a familiar voice—that singular combination of sounds—by its vibratory qualities; for machines, to receive a frequency suggests a presence, not the existence in absence manifested by a sign. As a pulse, this text appears here by virtue of a circuit. In the event that you’re online, this text is present in your screen by a connection that actualizes its being here, wherever you are. This is the strange closeness of the virtual phenomena, a state of experiencing something extremely close but never in private, because of the infrangible distance between the space of the reader and
the virtual container of this text and given the fact that this text appears here and, at the same time, potentially anywhere else that this site could be accessed. In spite of its virtuality, this text is present as a synchronicity, a simultaneous occurrence that tends to create a momentary relation, an alignment in time but not necessarily in space. This seems to be a characteristic of internet phenomena. The perceivable presence of something if the circuit of a programming structure, a hosting site, a set of protocols for transmission, an interface for interaction and an internet connection is complete, not in the sense of the technological chain of development that make possible to publish online but in the actual coexistence of all those conditions without which a web page doesn’t appears. These conditions of possibility constitute what’s being called here a circuit. To read online involves actualizing that connection. If a sign exists only in absence, this text is, as light in a bulb, not a sign but and
indication of presence, a pulse. This text appears here but is not here in the way a printed text would be, for example, described in a given area of paper. By a strange reversal, instead of making the virtual thing a physical being, we’ve found ways to exist online, a technological promise of perennial presence that, in some way, marks the migration of space into time. To publish something online is to make it present wherever there is a point of access, here or anywhere else. Regarding the means of its presence, this text appears in an interface for you to read but it cannot be seen on itself. It’s only by means of an interface that you’re able to read it. Which brings about its immaterial being and the empty body of the interface you’re using right now. However present, this text is located elsewhere, hosted over computer networks and visible to you by request and, as such, it exists in a synchronicity devoid of space. Its signal is made possible by physical means that exist somewhere else and, unlike the
analogue version of its printed code, it is not only a sign—which always exist in absence—but a digital impulse traveling over networks, codified and decodified in fast transactions and distributed by protocols of transmission that also allow for it being instantly tracked. The fact that to read online involves such transactions is what possibly marks a new modality of consumption of information that moves from reading as an experience of privacy towards reading as a transaction that involves notions of tracking, access, connection and consume of data plans because, differently from its printed version, this text—as many of the social platforms online— was free to publish but its access—regarding an internet connection—must be paid.