Certain online communities just freak me right the fuck out. MySpace is at the top of the list. It is full of fear and horror for me. I step in carefully to read Monica’s blog and then flee. Dating sites have a similar vibe. LiveJournal isn’t quite as bad.

But what occurred to me is that the realization of Gibson’s and Stephenson’s cyberspace isn’t 3D virtual reality worlds. It isn’t that we will represent ourselves as glowing avatars of various form and resolution. The blogsphere has become our virtual reality. Here we stake out territories and populate them with iterations of ourselves, projections constructed in profiles and posts. Blogs are a kind of spiritual real estate where other people don’t just interact with *us* but with us at a specific moment in time. It’s TiVo for communication, our life timeshifted. Want to interact with the Drey from a week ago? Scroll down the page. Want to discuss the events of a certain day? It’s in the archive.