“In the sprawling anarchy of the web, the borderline between fact and fiction has melted away."
So writes Camille Paglia, literary critic and professor, in an article on singer and performer Lady Gaga for the London Sunday Times last month. The point she is making is that the technology which mediates every communication and every entertainment for those of us born after, say, 1980, has deformed our ability to recognize certain things as good and beautiful. Thus we make the mistake of thinking that Gaga’s voice is as good as Janis Joplin’s, or that her dance moves are as skillful as Madonna’s. But the point I want to extract from her argument is something that she says implicitly: that there is a baseline reality against which we can measure our illusions—that even though the borderline has melted away, there are still facts distinguishable from fictions.
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