Internet as a Non-Place: A Late Update of Marc Augé

Non-Place of Communication. AI image

Introduction

When Marc Augé published Non-Places in the mid-1990s, the internet had not yet assumed the central role it now plays in everyday life. His diagnosis of what he called surmodernity relied primarily on physical infrastructures: airports, highways, shopping malls, hotel chains. More than twenty years later, in the lecture La identidad y los derechos humanos (Identity and Human Rights), delivered at a Mexican university, Augé returns to his own theoretical framework and explicitly introduces a phenomenon that was only just emerging at the time of the book’s publication: the internet. Far from revising or correcting his concept, this late reconsideration extends it and confirms its continued relevance.

The significance of the lecture lies precisely in this gesture. It shows that the logic of the non-place is not confined to material spaces, but can also be applied to contemporary environments of communication.

The Non-Place: A Concise Definition

Augé defines the anthropological place as one that brings together identity, relation, and history. A place is recognizable because it inscribes subjects within a shared symbolic network, produces memory, and stabilizes social bonds. A non-place, by contrast, is defined by the absence of such inscriptions: it does not generate belonging, it does not sediment narratives, and it requires nothing more than a functional relationship.

Airports, highways, and supermarkets are not empty spaces, but environments regulated by implicit contracts, instructions, signage, and flows. One moves through them, obeys their rules, consumes, but rarely dwells in them. The non-place is not a pathology, but a spatial form characteristic of surmodernity.

The Lecture: The Explicit Entry of the Internet

In Identity and Human Rights, Augé directly refers to contemporary media when enumerating the devices that structure the modern experience of space. Alongside transportation systems, he mentions “telephones, the internet, television, cable systems,” integrating them into the same logic of circulation.

The internet thus appears not as an exception, but as a coherent extension of the original diagnosis. If airports organize the transit of bodies and goods, the network organizes the transit of signs, images, and messages. The material substrate changes; the structure remains the same.

Internet as a Non-Place of Communication

From this perspective, the internet can be understood as a non-place of communication. This does not mean denying that content is exchanged there, but rather examining how relations are configured. The subject who circulates online is not a situated person, but a user identified through passwords, profiles, or data. Interaction with others takes place through interfaces, protocols, and codes.

The dominant temporality is that of a continuous present: constant updating, accelerated replacement, archiving without lived memory. Information accumulates, but shared historicity remains thin. Communication is intense, yet it rarely translates into symbolic rootedness.

Augé does not formulate a moral condemnation of this phenomenon. He simply observes that the internet reproduces, at the communicational level, the structural traits of the non-place: relative anonymity, contractual relations, and circulation without durable inscription.

Relevance for Semiotics and Graphic Design

This update of the concept is particularly productive for semiotics and graphic design. Design largely operates within non-places: signage systems, pictograms, logos, interfaces, wayfinding devices. Their effectiveness depends on immediate legibility rather than historical depth.

Online, this logic is intensified. Signs must be instantly recognizable, adaptable, and easily replaceable. Designers address generic users in contexts of accelerated transit, where attention is fragile and meaning is rapidly consumed. Thinking of the internet as a non-place helps clarify the symbolic conditions under which visual communication is produced today.

Conclusion

Marc Augé’s lecture Identity and Human Rights demonstrates that the concept of the non-place retains its analytical power more than two decades after its initial formulation. By incorporating the internet, Augé does not abandon his theoretical framework, but extends it into new territories. The network does not contradict Non-Places; it prolongs it.

Understood as a non-place of communication, the internet emerges as one of the privileged spaces of surmodernity. For those working with signs, images, and systems of orientation, this perspective offers a valuable tool for thinking about the contemporary circulation of meaning.

Bibliography

Augé, M. (1995). Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso.
Augé, M. (n.d.). La identidad y los derechos humanos. University lecture.
Castells, M. (1996). The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell.