Virtual Hamlets in the Virtual World

A Romantic, says Nietzsche, is someone who always wants to be elsewhere. If that's so, then the children of the Internet are Romantics, for they perpetually wish to be someplace else …

The Internet is perhaps the most centrifugal technology ever devised. The classroom, where you sit down in one space at one time and ponder a text or an issue in slow motion, is coming to feel ever more antiquated …

For students now, life is elsewhere … students live in the future and not the present; they live with their prospects for success and pleasure. They dwell in possibility.

—Mark Edmundson, “Dwelling in Possibilities,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 14, 2008, available from: http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i27/27b00701.htm