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 imageà

- 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 territoryà 

-- Jean Baudrillard