You may have noticed my critical tone, regarding my MA degree. Nearly one year later, I continue to research and refine my ideas and now have a slightly different perspective. The MA had its problems, some of which affected all students, and some of which were pretty much unique to me and my interests. There were serious staffing problems, and the level of theoretical/critical insight was not what I expected for a postgraduate degree. I now place this in a wider context, as follows.

My main research interest was the cultural study of the Internet. In Web Studies (David Gauntlett ed, 2000), Silver suggests that there are three stages to cyberculture:

1) Popular Cyberculture

Early 1990s; idealistic, utopian, journalistic and mostly descriptive rhetoric

2) Cyberculture Studies

People started to ask questions about online communities and personal identity; the psychology of 'cyberspace'

3) Critical Cyberculture Studies

Late 1990s; focuses on four main areas:

· Social, economic and cultural interactions

· Examining the stories we tell about those interactions

· Examining the factors which make interaction possible and/or thwarts it

· Assessing the design process which becomes the interface between the network and the user

During my MA, I was only exposed to the first and second stages of cyberculture studies. There were two reasons for this. Firstly, the staffing problem I referred to. Ultimately, there's not much that can be said about that except that it was unfortunate.

Secondly - and this is of critical interest - cyberculture studies is still emerging. The first and second phases currently outweigh the third, and there are a large number of "very similar, tedious and repetitive academic articles that basically all say 'cyberspace…you can play with identity…nobody knows who you really are…gosh', but fail to develop any theoretical insights beyond this once-engaging thought" (Gauntlett, p 15). After several months ploughing through the preliminary literature, I formed the same conclusion. I was tired with the subject, and moved to another area of research and creative practice: digital video.

Since then, I have refined my ideas about cyberculture. There are "half-baked and slightly out-of-date pieces on how the Internet is going to transform democracy, politics, relationships and other stuff" (ibid, p 6). They still exist, and continue to influence current thinking. It's the academic equivalent of the commercial dot com era. The naïve enthusiasm will eventually disappear, replaced with a more considered and intelligent outlook.

I particularly struggled with two areas. First, unexamined references to Jean Baudrillard. His ideas seem to describe 'cyberspace' and 'virtual reality' very closely. They are domains of 'simulation', where the digital façade replaces material reality. However, Baudrillard's work needs closer examination. If it is flawed - which I believe it is - then it is a strange way to justify digital media.

Second, I struggled with the rhetoric that underlies 'virtual reality' technology; I felt that it was philosophically naïve. My perspective on these two areas is now as follows.

I regard both 'cyberspace' and 'virtual reality' as particular planes of interaction. They can be absorbing and immersive, but that does not mean there is nothing else to consider. Like a photographic depth of field they are a narrow perceptual domain, beyond which everything is temporarily unfocussed. I read books where serious critics used this to develop ideas about changing your identity, and escaping the parameters of the physical body and its particular gender. The fact is, eventually you switch the computer off and your 'depth of field' returns to normal, materially based experience.

Technology manipulates the space between content and audience; a computer monitor becomes a middle ground where the two can meet. This 'middle ground' is increasingly fetishised. It exists - and is experienced - separately from the people that create it.

Walter Benjamin examined the new significance of 'art' when it can be easily reproduced; he was particularly interested in photography. His analysis equally applies to digital art - there are questions about authenticity and artificiality. More pertinently, his analysis concerned the situation where human agency no longer exists. Machines and now computers can generate and reproduce 'art'; computers can generate interactive domains that have affective value.

And yet: if you focus beyond the experiential plane of the computer monitor, you have to acknowledge the wider 'depth of field' - the psychological, sociological, and political ideas and ideologies that underlie it; the people that made it and what they were trying to do, and why. Digital media of all kinds operates at both the sociological and aesthetic level. Both must be taken into account; 'techno-culture' is not a hermetically sealed domain.