Another striking trend is the renewed blurring of the boundaries between different categories of addresses. [⇒ Blurring the Boundaries]
Addresses of people and addresses of computers are no different on the Internet. Computers can get used to suspecting people behind certain other computers, greeting them by their proper names, and making suggestions to them regarding, for example, their shopping behavior on the basis of preferences previously documented in communications.
In some ways, this seems like a return to the situation of segmentally differentiated social systems, like a departure from the humanization in address formation that has characterized most complex societies.
But it is still true that we do not observe computers by means of the distinction between Information and Utterance, that we do not assume a situation of double contingency when retrieving information from, say, a database. [This seems to be changing with regard to the anthropomorphization of avatars, which let us imagine the ChatGPT counterpart as a person.]
At the same time, the technique of addressing is being pushed into ever finer performance domains. The technique of "packet-switching", which has been chosen for the Internet in contrast to telephony, requires that even small units of communication are always provided with an extremely precise addressing, which allows them to precisely locate the addressed target while the chosen path is irrelevant.
~
STICHWEH, Rudolf, 2000. Die Weltgesellschaft: soziologische Analysen. Orig.-Ausg. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch Wissenschaft, 1500. ISBN 978-3-518-29100-9, p. 228