I think about the Web quite a lot; I feel I am trying to identify what is superficial nonsense, and what is intelligent. It's not easy to do this, because much of the rhetoric about 'cyberspace' looks elegant and convincing, but is in fact nonsense. It takes time to work it out.

My MA in Creative Technology was a microcosm of this process. It was my personal discovery of the wonderful Internet that inspired me to be there, and while I was dismayed to find that we were expected to read Marx and Heidegger, I was able to pursue my own research into cyberspace.

Of course Marx and Heidegger are important, but I decided I did not want to write like them, that it is psychologically unhealthy to get too immersed in that kind of work, and their convoluted density reflects a cognitive outlook that I do not want to emulate. But it's the familiar story: you have a reading list, and your tutors have certain expectations.

I was initially excited by the cyberspace rhetoric, but over a period of a few months rapidly became bored with it. The underlying premises lack intellectual perception and more importantly, the discourse is not located in wider cultural theory. The term 'technoculture' - title of one of my course modules - summarises a body of work which, because it is sealed off from wider context, has a cult-like status. It goes with computer games, science fiction and 'mad scientist' views about technology. I think people who go along with all this sometimes produce valid creative work - they just talk such nonsense when they attempt to describe it.

My proposition is this: that was a postgraduate, Masters degree; you expect intellectual credibility at that level. I had arrived there from a fairly academic and literary background, and as the course progressed turned increasingly to those critical skills, because that rigour was not an integral part of the MA.

The course is by no means unique; there are university departments all around the world which teach like that. And I see a similar thing in other academic contexts: fantasy, i.e. baseless proposition, is presented as credible premise. When you are talking about technology, it takes the form of the debate about the 'virtual'. Cyberspace is supposed to be a 'virtual space', and good old Jean Baudrillard is called up to account for it.

However: I suggest there is also a 'virtual text', i.e. a form of discourse, popularly accepted, that is effectively a 'virtual reality' of the mind. When you get beyond its seductive sophistication, you find that it's no more than imagination. It presents itself as philosophy, but is in fact just an aesthetic. Beaudrillard's thesis that simulation is replacing reality (Disney, themed shopping malls, the Internet etc.) also applies at the intellectual level.

Because the intellectual mind can rove freely without constraint or reference to material conditions, it can and does formulate models and hypotheses that have no basis. Cultural theory is particularly prone to this. It is - historically, at least - the application of philosophical method to current form. Analytic and philosophical enquiry is intrinsically speculative, as a form of intellectual rigour. But where cultural theory refers to cultural facts, it assumes that concepts are equivalent to reality. They are not.

The text is the ultimate 'virtual reality' because it is infinitely subtle and widely accepted. This has been true for thousands of years, and is the reason for the enduring popularity and great power of literature - so great, that people will kill and start wars to defend a piece of writing (called 'the Bible', 'the Koran' etc.).