The unbearable lightness of the Internet

"For all the damage to reputations the Internet can cause, perhaps the greater anxiety from online communication is the weightlessness of it all. The whole World Wide Web can seem like a hall of mirrors — nothing tangible, no binding, no watermarks, no notary public seals. Where, exactly, is it? How do we know any of it is true?"

Buried toward the end of Noam Cohen's July 7, 2008 New York Times story about the Boing Boing/Xeni Jardin/Violet Blue dustup, the paragraph above struck me as being a wonderful summation of the strangeness of the virtual.