If you make a revolution, make it for fun. Don't do it in ghastly seriousness, don't do it in deadly earnest, do it for fun.
- D.H. Lawrence

All our machines are screens, and the interactivity of humans
has been replaced by the interactivity of screens. Nothing inscribed
on these screens is ever intended to be deciphered in any depth:
rather, it is supposed to be explored instantaneously, in an abreaction
immediate to meaning, a short-circuiting of the poles of representation.
- Jean Baudrillard



     
 That this renovation of the reality so recently deconstructed should have 
 to be panic-stricken is not
 necessarily predetermined. Realizing the impossibility of achieving
  some ultimate determinable
 meaning, of "self" or of whatever, the cognizant subject realizes that
 the field of possibility is limitless, and delights in the "predicament." 

The "trick," it seems, of these cognizant subjects, is that they reconstruct and renovate reality not on the level of the metanarrative (which is now impossible), but on the level of the "mininarrative" -- a focus on the self, an aestheticization and avowed fictionalization of the self -- that both provides a counter to the postmodern condition of ennui and serves to fill the hole left by the twentieth-century project of deconstruction.

     What the relatively simple and already existing technological tools of the Web have done is provide a ready medium for this small-scale renovation of reality. What the authors of these personal Web pages -- and, in particular, these personal Web diaries -- have done is this: They have dispensed with the impossible task of recovering totalizing, transcendental reality in favor of a reality that now fits on a floppy disk.



With our relationships spread across the globe and our knowledge of other cultures relativizing our attitudes and depriving us of any norm, we exist in a state of continuous construction and reconstruction; it is a world where anything goes that can be negotiated. Each reality of self gives way to reflexive questioning, irony, and ultimately the playful probing of yet another reality. The center fails to hold.
-- David Gergen


We don't know what to make of ourselves precisely because we are, more than ever before, able to remake ourselves -- a conundrum reflected in the cognitive dissonance of our mass media, where images of the body as a temple in ads for Evian bottled water and Calvin Klein's Obsession perfume collide with images of that temple desecrated in splatter movies and Stephen King novels.
-- Mark Dery


We may soon conclude that the single most important contribution of the 1960s à to popular culture is the notion that we have chosen our reality arbitrarily. The mission of the cyberian counterculture of the 1990s, armed with new technologies, familiar with cyberspace and daring enough to explore unmapped realms of consciousness, is to rechoose reality consciously and purposefully.
-- Douglas Rushkoff