"Perhaps this quote is the most useful for supporting Pam's thesis (one I've been working on, too) that much of the Internet resembles face-to-face communication. Why else would Internet researchers have to be reminded that posting emails is a form of publication unless, of course, Internet posting is so pervasively considered to be something other than publishing--e.g., f2f communication." - Alex Halavais, last week I find this statement curious for a number of reasons. For instance, I feel that many books and print works have the same visceral quality as face to face communication, while many print ads or commercials, billboards, etc. feel cold. I think that the same is true of the net, so that "desktop publishing" resembles face-to-face in so far as it is personalized in some way by the writer. However, since the formal establishment of signs and signifiers is not quite present, static, or established in our consciousness- and since the volume of information that we deal with is so daunting that these things often have shifting meanings and allusions, we are confronted in a far more colloquial manner. I believe that individuals, in most informal cases (such as this), write more as if they were having a conversation, which should be obvious but, I question very much if it is anything beyond that. We all know that the internet has "changed the way we communicate" but I think that behind all the rhetoric, and the obvious difference in tools, the nature of the message behind it all is the same (though moving at a much faster rate). An unpersonalized message, or a corporate site- something anonymous does not resemble the visceral qualities of a conversation to me no matter how it is presented. Also, are you proposing to set aside the great deal of pornography which engulfs the internet and would you say that it resembles f2f? -Bob