The internet will eat your soul.

Digitextuality is a term that expresses the continuities between old media and new media.

It differs from mere intertextuality because it moves beyond a new signifying system, and makes its meaning not only by building a new text through the absorption of influence from other texts, but by embedding the entirety of other text within the new.

The internet has swallowed everything else - how can other media compete?

To be sure, the internet, unlike any other media outlet, can make us believe that we exist as an avatar. I am not my Facebook account, for example. But someone who checks it out thoroughly might believe they are well aquainted with me even though it doesnt show my real name, pictures from only a small segment of a few years of my life, or even a comprehensive list of interests or favourite books.

Turkle stated that it is on the internet that our confrontations with technology as it collides with our sense of human identity are fresh, even raw. Serious gamers out there might believe that the internet is the only true life. And there are a bunch of games that capitalize on this. Second life, Simms, and so many others, are digital identities that we can slip into and out of like a pair of shoes.

There are lots of ways we can interact with the internet. To interact internally is to become a member of a virtual world. To interact externally is to be situated outside of it, controlling it "from above". Then there are exploratory, when we are free to wander around the online world, and ontological, when we determind the world and the story that comes out of it.

Games usually involve internal / ontological participation (especially adventure games, as opposed to simulation games).

If there is anything Noel Caroll taught me with his discussion of horror films, it is the fact that the emotions we experience through fiction are exactly the same as the ones envoked by reality.

It makes me sort of uncomfortable to think I could have control over an entire world, fall in love, kill people, have babies, get rich, and even die, without any of that ever even existing exept in my own mind.

But that brings me to a larger question ... does it really matter ?

After I watched the Matrix I was quite content to decide that if this world simply didn't exist, I wouldn't really care. The experience of life is simply that - an experience. So I suppose it doesn't really matter if you want to live vicariously through an avatar.

My room mates aren't even up yet and I've already had an existential crisis. What ELSE is new?