Have you ever surfed the Web for so long that you forgot what time it was?
What happens to time in cyberspace?
Does time exist in cyberspace?

You will have clicked on the five to access this page. What made you choose this number? Did you click clockwise through the numbers or did you randomly decide which page to access? Do you think it would make any difference?
I can assure you that I did not intend any special order in which the essays should be read. If you decided to read them clockwise, you would have chosen an order as arbitrarily as any other one.

In cyberspace, time is experienced in a different way than in our everyday life. In fact, time is a mere illusion that is suggested with cyberspatial means. An update is not a newer version of something that has already existed, but it is an entirely new space replacing another one.
A new print magazine does not occupy any space that would not have existed before, while a new 'netzine' opens up territories that were nonexistent before. These spaces are theoretically accessible from all over the world; their actual, physical existence is not important since only their cyberspatiality allows one to visit them via virtual travel within a second.

New spaces are not built in cyberspace, they simply pop up, expanding cyberspace's realm. Time is thus experienced as a complete thereness, while changes are experienced as a change of space. If you want to go back to the page you read before, press the 'back' button on your browser, and in all propability the page will reappear. Should that not be the case, it would be due to the disappearance of its space and not because of your hasitating to return. Time must not play an important role since its linearity would conflict with cyberspace's parallelism. The main question in cyberspace is not 'How long?' but 'Where?'.

It is interesting to see the amount of pages 'under construction' that signal that they are already 'there' without really offering anything. Advertisements for upcoming events are obviously not uncommon, but imagine a newspaper that advertises its own release in a pre-issue that contains nothing.

The thereness and timelessness of cyberspace explain why it is relatively easy to waste your time on the Web. It just does not feel like wasting time since the notion of time is not important at all in cyberspace. All you can concentrate on is following something or letting yourself flow around the Web.