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You make movies for the big screen, sitcoms for TV, and something else entirely for the Internet.

He wanted to create shows in which the line between reality and fiction is blurred, where viewers can correspond with the characters and actually become involved in the story by posting their own videos.

"It's a new medium. It requires new storytelling techniques.

When I write--text or hypertext, fiction or theory--I must set aside a certain space in which to work. I use the word "space" here to group several kinds of space: physical, temporal, and cognitive. The writing space is not merely a desk or office where I keep my manuscripts and disks and pens and computer. It is also a space of time set aside from day to day life: from my job, from my wife, from all people and activities other than the work, the writing. But all the time and (physical) space in the world would be to no avail if I could not set aside one further space, a kind of internal solitude--a meditation perhaps--to which I turn to recapture the vision I had when last I wrote, or to see what lies ahead. This space is a little hard to describe, but it is there that writing, as I have quoted Walter Ong elsewhere, transforms human consciousness

I use the term "writing space" not just because I find it apt, but on purpose to augment the ways in which Jay David Bolter uses it in Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Bolter uses the term in at least three ways, all developed out of his initial concentration, the literal writing space,"the physical and visual field defined by a particular technology of writing": the papyrus, the page, the computer screen (Bolter 1991, 11)

What has she found? That the Internet links millions of people in new spaces that are changing the way we think and the way we form our communities. That we are moving from "a modernist culture of calculation toward a postmodernist culture of simulation." That life on the screen permits us to "project ourselves into our own dramas, dramas in which we are producer, director, and star.... Computer screens are the new location for our fantasies, both erotic and intellectual. We are using life on computer screens to become comfortable with new ways of thinking about evolution, relationships, sexuality, politics, and identity." Turkle's own metaphor of windows serves well to introduce the following samplings from her new book. Those boxed-off areas on the screen, Turkle writes, allow us to cycle through cyberspace and real life, over and over. Windows allow us to be in several contexts at the same time - in a MUD, in a word-processing program, in a chat room, in e-mail. "Windows have become a powerful metaphor for thinking about the self as a multiple, distributed system," Turkle writes. "The self is no longer simply playing different roles in different settings at different times. The life practice of windows is that of a decentered self that exists in many worlds, that plays many roles at the same time." Now real life itself may be, as one of Turkle's subjects says, "just one more window."

ender-swapping on MUDs is not a small part of the game action. By some estimates, Habitat, a Japanese MUD, has 1.5 million users. Habitat is a MUD operated for profit. Among the registered members of Habitat, there is a ratio of four real-life men to each real-life woman. But inside the MUD the ratio is only three male characters to one female character. In other words, a significant number of players, many tens of thousands of them, are virtually cross-dressing.

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