The Web dissolves perimeters of time, place, and culture. Boundaries between nations, home and work, intimate time and business time, between night and day, and between individuals and organizations. There is no sovereignty in a boundaryless, electronic world. Capital, consumers, and corporations, in the form of communication packets, cross political boundaries millions of times every day. We explore two distinctions that the Web is blurring, fact and fantasy, public and private.
First, although hyperreality will be discussed in detail in the next section, it is important to point out that the distinction between reality and virtual reality diminishes on the Web. Fact and fantasy combine, the distinction between representations and their physical form become increasingly blurred. As Web usage increases, and more and more cultural objects are viewed on computer screens, there is likely to be a growing confusion of the representation with the original objects they portray. Amazon.com, promoted as the world's largest bookstore, stocks a few best-sellers. The Web site is the defining presence. The reality is created not by bricks, mortar, and paper, but by digitized fragments displayed on a computer screen.
An example from the Web that illustrates this, and also the resulting blurring of the distinction between high and low culture, is Le MusÈe Imaginaire. Le MusÈe Imaginaire sells paintings by the world's most famous artists such as Van Gogh, Canaletto, and Turner, to the world's most famous people, such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sophia Loren, and Michael Jackson. The irony is that they are all fakes--genuine authentic fakes. (This can be taken both ways: the pictures are fakes, as the people who buy them are fakes in the sense of being actors and actresses). The fact that the site has received no less than 15 Web-design or cool site awards is testimony to a cyberculture that values the image equal to, or indeed over and above, the real. Indeed, in exact replication, how can one distinguish the authentic from the fake?
A search engine may return 10,000 hits on Shakespeare, but cannot tell you which sites contain genuine content written by the Bard, which contain informed discussion of his works, or which are complete nonsense. This echoes the widespread problem in cyberspace of establishing authenticity and, indeed, questions the very notion of our prior conceptual distinctions. When everything is a re-presentation, how can one speak of an original?
The distinction between private and public is also rendered especially problematic on the Web. All activity (personal and commercial) in cyberspace is routinely monitored to a degree unimaginable in the physical world. A person's activities can be, and routinely are, catalogued in minute detail, and used to build intimate and revealing profiles of that person. People remain ambivalent to this monitoring, for on the one hand, it can help in channeling products and services that have added value to the individual, while on the other, it can represent a flagrant breach of a person's privacy.
In summary, the Web blurs the distinction between private and public in such a way as to make it difficult to compartmentalize our lives in the same way as in the physical world.
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