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In "In Be-Tween: Or, Writing on the Midway," Victor
Vitanza explains the ways in which the absolute speed or simultaneity (Virilio's
"third
interval") experienced in MOOspace "implodes what we might
still call 'writing.' Implodes it as telepresence. Or transpresence, contributing,"
Vitanza suggests, "to the death of print culture" (88). Typically, we
imagine three temporalities: past, present, future. But the third interval posits
a "fourth temporal condition" that replaces the present and collapses
past and future, leaving us with "telepresence." Telepresence: the absolute
speed required for time and space to collapse. Requiring a kind of stationary
mobility, a taking off that nonetheless stays in place, Virilio's third interval
names the blurring of two supposedly distinct modes of existence: dwelling and
traveling. When writing in MOOspace, this simultaneity or this telepresence is operative,
Vitanza observes, initiating a vertiginous unraveling, a vertigo
of expropriation, in which "I lose a sense—again, intermittently—of
who I am writing in that third interval."
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