immersion

"Commerce is the ocean that information swims in." (Mondo 2000: A User's Guide to the New Edge) 

There are a number of ways to approach the metaphors of immersion and navigation that suffuse descriptions of technology. The psychological theme of the "oceanic" is explored by Freud in Civilization and its Discontents among other places, and provides an interpretation of the sense immensity that the term conveys. 

The seafaring metaphor of navigation, with its associations to smooth space, is a problem of finding reference points in a dynamic and fluid situation which is necessarily relativistic.