Work and school used to be places before they were activities. Participating meant being bodily present.
Before networks, people worked and learned in offices and classrooms. They relied on printed forms and handouts, and job seekers completed paper applications in person or mailed printed résumés to employers.
Now people can apply for jobs, work, learn, and collaborate remotely through websites, video meetings, cloud services, and shared documents. I teach sections where I never share a room with my students, and it works.
The through-line: once work became information flow, it could travel wherever packets travel. Presence stopped being a building and became a connection. That redrew the geography of jobs and education — and it quietly made a reliable connection the new prerequisite for showing up at all.
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