The essential paradigm of cyberspace is creating partially situated identities out of actual or potential social reality in terms of canonical forms of human contact, thus renormalizing the phenomenology of narrative space and requiring the naturalization of the intersubjective cognitive strategy, and thereby resolving the dialectics of metaphorical thoughts, each problematic to the other, collectively redefining and reifying the paradigm of the parable of the model of the metaphor.

-- Chip Morningstar, from "How To Deconstruct Almost Anything"

Isn't that beautiful? It makes me perfectly homesick for the good old days when I was an English Lit. major at MTSU, and took Literary Criticism. God, it was a brilliant class. I finally realized all that stuff means something. Generally, what it means is people are trying to justify an otherwise useless degree, but never mind. I had a good time in the class because I was easily old enough to be everyone's mother, and none of them had a clue as to what dialogic criticism or the anxiety of influence was about. Neither did I, but I was much better at A) faking it, and B) catching on.

My favorite part of the class was having to read and deconstruct 'Moby Dick.' I never knew what an interesting book it was until I had the tools to pick it apart. I don't know that I'd want to bring that kind of intense scrutiny to most of my favorite novels (though I think they'd hold up rather well, certainly in the case of John Crowley and Samuel Delany's writing), but it was great fun to dissect chapters on processing whale sperm as a manly bonding rite.

What Chip has to say about cyberspace is true, of course, but most of us wouldn't express it that way. Most of us would just say that people use whatever tools they have to create their social reality, and cyberspace offers some unique tools. Well, okay. Maybe most of us would say, "r u a gurl?"