Move forward another ten years, and, through portable devices with connectivity (smartphones and then tablets), the internet stopped being something statically available from particular points in space and became a dimension that overlays social space continuously. As Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge put it, “Software . . . alters the conditions through which society, space and time, and thus spatiality, are produced.” As a result, the internet, understood as an infrastructure of connection, has reconstituted social space in a fundamental way.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 113