The rest of the world has been transformed by the possibility of access

“The great geographical Other, the faraway rest of the world, has been transformed by the pure possibility of access. The numbers of distance and time no longer mean what they used to. Every place, once unique, itself, is strangely shot through with radiations from every other place. “There” was then; “here” is now.”
–Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (1994)