In Travels in Hyperreality, Umberto Eco talks about America's fixation with "the real thing," the more real than real, the absolute fake. He claims that we have a "reconstructive neurosis," an obsession with duplication, that causes us to construct vast iconic temples to our perceptions of the past. Even when these temples are monuments to fiction, like Disneyland, the fantasy must be all-encompassing, to the extent that if one was to go (as did Eco) from Disneyland's version of New Orleans to the real New Orleans in less than 24 hours, you find that the "real" city is a bit of a disappointment - not quite as New Orleans as the Disney version. Places like Disneyland, he argues, produce total illusion, and then, by confessing it, stimulate the desire for it. "Disneyland," he says, "tells us that technology can give us more reality than nature can."

The Internet is an interesting experiment in defining reality - and falsehood. How we learn to communicate over the internet will help define how we deal with other people for the next millennium. I read an article recently that said that in just one month, employees from IBM, Apple and AT&T "together spent the equivalent of 1,631 eight-hour work days visiting the Penthouse site." Just Penthouse, just at work! More than a dozen Compaq employees were fired this spring after registering more than 1000 hits, each, on sex sites from work.

So, let's talk about cyberporn. This will not be (I promise) a diatribe for or against pornography. Pornography is a very complex issue. I do support sex workers organizing, unionizing, and protecting their bodies, their health, and their living wage. I do believe that the objectification of women leads, in a labyrinthine way, to violence against women and other forms of misogyny.

This is a cautionary tale, not about virtual reality, but about dis-reality.

However, I also acknowledge that there is a lot of scholarship out there that discusses these issues with more authority and grace than I can muster. What I do want to discuss is what effect the building of temples of falsehood, of total illusions, has on the way we relate to other people. This is a cautionary tale, not about virtual reality, but about dis-reality.

To me, the most interesting of all the varieties of cyberporn is live video teleconferencing porn. That's where you download some video-chat software, dial into a central number, then see and "talk" to someone (usually female) on your computer screen who, most times, ends up taking off her clothes. These women are carefully sculpted, preened, waxed and shaved, made-up, so that they'll be the perfect model of what men are supposed to want. They follow a careful, pre-described set of actions, gestures and dialogues. The sites are remarkably, remarkably similar. And the women all look pretty much the same. They are simply actresses acting out a role prescribed by dominant culture. They are hyperreal, monuments to falsehood, absolute fakes.

Look carefully, you can see where the backdrops end. Or think to yourself - she's busy stripping - who exactly is typing her half of this supposed dialogue? The backdrops end in warehouses on the outskirts of LA, or Las Vegas, or wherever - warehouses full of women who are probably tired, and thinking about what they're going to eat for dinner and what they're going to do with their boyfriends or girlfriends when they get off work. The person typing the dialogue is probably some big old guy named Joe with a cigarette and a cup of cold coffee and braces on his wrists so he doesn't get carpal tunnel from typing "oh baby, you're so, so good" over and over and over again for eight hours a day.

You're being hoodwinked - bamboozled - and more than that, you're being fleeced. Eco says that in Disneyland, "[t]he Main Street facades are presented as toy houses and invite us to enter them, but their interior is always a disguised supermarket, where you buy obsessively, believing that you are still playing."

You're being hoodwinked - bamboozled - and more than that, you're being fleeced.

Online sex malls are no different. The lowest price I found was $2.95 a minute, and range to $5.95 and above. Ten minutes is nearly $60. For that, you can have a nice dinner with a friend and then go out for a couple of drinks.

Who knows, maybe you'll even meet a nice person who, later on, may be perfectly happy to take their clothes off for you live and in person.

My main concern is what effect all of these layers of falsehood will have on the future of human interaction. I have a friend who did phone sex for a couple of years to fund her documentary film. I asked her if she thought video teleconferencing porn was better or worse than live booths. She said that it was probably better for the workers themselves: that she did phone sex instead of dancing because she couldn't bear to actually see the men on the other side.

In virtual "interactive" porn, the distance between subject and subject is even vaster. We're not just talking about a layer of glass or a two-way mirror separating the viewer and his stack of quarters from the dancer in the booth. At least the girl in the booth is a physical presence. The virtual strippers are separated from the viewer by a camera, telephone wires, a computer screen, and potentially thousands of miles.

Virtual pornography puts so many layers of falsehood between the actor and the viewer that it creates a porn-Disneyland.

While I think it may be better for the workers themselves (who knows, maybe the warehouses are climate-controlled and there's a nice room with sandwiches and a couch in the back for off-hours), virtual pornography puts so many layers of falsehood between the actor and the viewer that it creates a porn-Disneyland - a hyperreality so encompassing that you could be disappointed with the real thing, like Eco was with the non-Disney New Orleans.

I know that a lot of folks like porn exactly because it is void of any interaction. It's, well, masturbatory. When you add another level of exclusion from human contact, you start seeing some of the dangers inherent in the concept of "cyber-community." While the Internet does offer us some interesting new ways to communicate, it can also serve to separate us by playing so happily, and so deftly, into our fantasy worlds that we lose touch with the fact that the dreamworld is a hyperreality - an "absolute fake." The societal forces that create cyberporn are the same ones that cover our apples and cucumbers with wax and dye to make them redder than red or greener than green and shiny, shiny, shiny. The personas you're seeing on the screen are covered and colored in the same way. In doing a striptease, they're actually donning layer after layer of cultural stereotype: a very specific look, very specific moves, a very specific dialogue. All of the advertisements for this stuff touts the services as "live and one-on-one," "personal encounters," and "interactive experiences." However you feel about pornography in general, let's not fool ourselves that this kind of thing is in any way interactive, or personal. Interaction requires at least two people who have agency, who have voice.

Let me take a contrasting example to show you what I mean. At Plugged In, an East Palo Alto community computing center, they're using the same basic video teleconferencing software to allow local teens to contact another group of teens in a Chicago community center to hold forums, in real time, on issues that are important to them. They use the forums to discuss everything from school and television to prison, racism and injustice. This is cyber-community. It's a perfect example of a way to use the internet to broaden your experiences, of creating real, lasting, important dialogue, instead of narrowing your field of vision.

Creating elaborate fantasy worlds with only one true, active participant is a dangerous dis-reality. If we allow it to, the Internet can serve to drive people apart, to drive us into a vicious solipsism by playing into these kinds of fabricated, masturbatory virtual realities. We, like Superman, create our own Fortresses of Solitude, and fill our world with caricatures of what people (especially women) should be. We create vast edifices, temples to these falsehoods. But, real people are there behind those facades on your cyberporn chat screen. Real people with real lives and real knowledge, with scars and histories and more fat than Cosmo would deem fashionable. Real people, most importantly, with real voices. And you know, real people (and by that I don't necessarily mean embodied people, but people with voice, with history, with self) are much sexier.