The notion that electronic technologies remove the human or material interaction from the literary process is more often a misguided cultural perception rather than a fact. Despite critics of virtual literature arguing that such forms of verbal transmission are ôrotting mindsö of youth, Hayles (1) maintains that virtuality is comparable to nature in its form, function and engagement of human beings but it is not actual nature: ôWhatever ænatureÆ may be, it is a holistic interactive environment, not a reenactment of the constructed bifurcations that humans impose in order to understand it better.ö

Virtual literature or virtuality is the outcome of the development of electronic technologies like personal computers and the World Wide Web (WWW). The transmission of words evolved from purely oral transfer to the written word. The evolution of one technol

This concept leads to the concept of proprioception, the human sense that defines where the boundaries of our bodies are (Hayles 14). These boundaries evolve over time from the combined forces of physiological feedback and habit. We perceive ourselves as inhabiting our bodies from the inside. Tennis players often perceive their racquet as an extension of their arm. Likewise, computer users feel ôproprioceptive coherence with the keyboard, experiencing the screen surface as a space into which subjectivity can flowö (Hayles 14). In this manner the main difference between the printed text and the virtual text is that the reader is unlikely to perceive the printed page as an extension of self.

Goodfellow, Robin. ôVirtuality and the Shaping of Educational Communities.ö Education, Communication & Information, 5(2), Jul 2005, 113-129.

Ong (21) suggests that ôPlatoÆs condemnation of writingö is quite comparable to contemporary criticsÆ views of virtuality or virtual literature. PlatoÆs criticisms included the belief that something artificial or foreign to human life could only corrupt and the belief tha