Explorations in the noosphere: Hermeneutic presence and hostility in cyberspace

This article works to uncover the nature of the currents of hostility that flow through various mediums in cyberspace. Drawing predominantly Ong’s work on contest and Ihde’s phenomenology of technics, the article explores how screens extend thought space and, at the same time, extend and simultaneously filter the presence of others. An additional encounter of presence, a hermeneutic presence, is a feature of our digital age and relies on our own limitations – cognitive, interpre-tive and communicative. These limitations lead to a concealment, a loss of hermeneutic cues, natural to presence, which can cause reversion to agonistic practices from orality.