In the last chapter, we have seen how livestreaming technologies transform downtime and enable alternative temporal spaces, allowing social practices that are shunned by the temporal structures of institution and society to retune and continue to thrive at the margin of these structures and at the centre of the everyday. At the heart of this transformation is the collective experience of the internet as a space – as well as the playful nature of this experience. Spatial language infuses the way in which the internet is discussed in popular culture. From the famous adage ‘On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog’ (Steiner, 1993), to allusions to ‘cyberspace’, ‘online world’, and ‘global village’, the internet is often understood as a place that is at once disembodied and yet spatially capable of bringing the world together (Graham, 2013). One goes ‘on’ the internet and ‘to’ a website in the English lexicon, as Graham (2013) points out, as if there is a singular virtual place equally accessible to all. Vernacular equivalents of the grammatical rules associated with the internet in the English language can also be found in Vietnamese – one goes ‘up’ or ‘onto’ the internet (‘lên’ mạng) or ‘into’ a website (‘vào’ web). As a space, the internet enables ‘free flows of information’ and is host to ‘online communities’. These spatial elaborations of the internet often go unexamined as they structure, condition, and constrain conceptualizations and thus computer-mediated practices, as well as producing novel experiences of place.

While the internet as a space lacks apparent coherence and closure, it is nevertheless seen as stationary and mapped out from the user-infrastructure perspective: even though the internet is a little different every time we refresh our newsfeed, click on a link, or livestream a video, there is a finite set of tasks that users can execute and manipulate when they are online. As such, activities on the internet take on an ontic role; this ontic role informs the notion that internet problems require internet-specific solutions – a discourse easily misconstrued as separate from problems and solutions that are ‘social’, ‘cultural’, or ‘political’.

This demarcation between technology and society is prominent in the framing of the mis/ disinformation problem (Hwang, 2020). Although digital mis/ disinformation hardly exists independently of the material technology that constitutes it, there appears to be a bifurcation of information as abstraction and technology as milieu.