McLuhan saw media as words:

Every human artifact, hardware or software, is a word—is linguistic in the full sense, and that all of man’s (sic) outerings or extensions of his body, are usually metaphors or linguistic forms and are in fact, language…. So all of man’s artifacts and outerings of himself--pushing his body outward, or his nervous system—and all of these are, in a full sense, linguistic, and therefore have their own semantics, grammars, syntax—everything. (McLuhan, 1980, p. xiii)

        Since space refers to time and distance, time and distance are reference points that are not in themselves physical.  Space is relational not physical.  Does this mean my spatial sense of self is determined by relational points?  How are these relational points formed?  How do I know that I reside here rather than there?  My senses form one set of relational detectors.  Is one sense more “spatial” than another?  Are sensory spatial cues formulated upon interpretative biases in a culture?  In an oral culture, words have a felt sense, a “presence” (Ong, 1970). They swirl about as if they are a thick fog, a physical reality.  In a literary culture, words have a visual sense.  They seem to be disembodied rather than wrapping around me.  They are separate, disconnected words.  Words are no longer a presence, but become a thought, inside and removed.  It seems that space and meaning have moved from outside, enveloping me like a blanket to an inside amorphous veil of meanings without concrete edges.  How does communication of "word" influence my sense of space and self?  Can my spatial sense be dictated by the communication media of the “word” as it is found in a culture?  What does this mean for our culture that is being buried in electronic media?  What does the electronic “word” do to our sense of self?

        Birkets (1994) describes how differently electronic words are perceived and influence our reality.  Words on a computer screen “are received with a sense of weightlessness—the weightlessness of its presentation (p. 155)…[and] seem to arrive from some collective elsewhere that seems more profound, deeper than mere writer’s subjectivity.  The word floats on the surface [of the computer screen] like a leaf on a river.  Phenomenologically, the word is less absolute” (p. 156).  When removed to storage, the words are “rendered invisible, seem to have reversed expressive direction and to have gone back into thought” (p. 155).

        Words seem to lack substance in a computer matrix.  They are more easily changed, less permanent.  Yet for some, writing on the computer brings a more permanent sense to the writing.  A classmate recently told me,

I am very careful what I write in the computer conference.  It is stored on a computer and you never know when it will be read by somebody.  Who knows if what I would write as my opinion today will not come back to haunt me later in life.  I am hesitant about what I write and so other students really don’t get to know me and what I really think.  It is another type of distance in this type of class. (Linda)