The impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level of the real is of the same order as the impossibility of staging illusion. Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible.
- Jean Baudrillard

What I want, in short, is that my (mobile) image, buffeted among a thousand shifting photographs, altering with situation and age, should always coincide with my (profound) "self"; but it is the contrary that must be said: "myself" never coincides with my image…
- Roland Barthes



     Along with this practice of aestheticizing the self comes the issue of authenticity: How do we know that what we're seeing on the Web is the "real" McCoy? Well, we don't. But neither should we necessarily be concerned that we don't. Personal Web pages are no different than RL when it comes to simulation of the displaced transcendental signified. We are always necessarily inauthentic, in the "meta" realm. We are always necessarily many selves at once, though we may not as easily recognize the mediating tools of self-construction as we do when we create our selves on the Web.

Still, the Web self is often positioned somewhere between RL and MUDs, for instance, where "you are what you pretend to be" (Sherry Turkle). Deprived of the anonymity a MUD provides, so many personal Web pages seem to try to walk a fine line between RW truth and VW fiction, bouncing back and forth in that liminal zone between the two, and either reveling in the play involved or despairing of the inescapability of the situation.





Now, once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of "posing," I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image.
-- Roland Barthes


[Some] have insisted that maintaining an artificial persona very different from one's sense of oneself in RL is what one called "cheap fuel," a novelty that wears thin fast because of the large amount of "psychic energy" required to maintain it. These people note that they want to reveal themselves to the members of a community that they care about.
-- Sherry Turkle


Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory -- precession of simulacra -- that engenders the territory…
-- Jean Baudrillard