Was it or wasn't it?

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It's one thing to adhere to the idea of no before or after in cyberspace, but quite another to link to what may fundamentally be the conclusion of this column right from its very beginning. Rather than being an example of "no before or after", doing that sort of thing might more accurately be what's called a spoiler. True, I often allow these columns a more or less linear development ... until toward the end I suddenly hint at an "or vice versa" conclusion that's almost diametrically opposed to what it seemed I'd been claiming throughout. But here I am, at the beginning of the very first paragraph, letting the cat out of the bag, and admitting that at the end of this column I may contradict myself.

In what way? Well, on the one hand I'll be suggesting in this column that the question of internet communities centered around porn are the tip of an iceberg of a massive topic that I can hardly even start to tackle. On the other, however, I'll also be hinting that ultimately the topic may be the proverbial mountain that turns out to be a molehill, and that any other examination of community (without the porn) would reach more or less the same conclusions.

And I guess that I'll have to continue reading until the end in order to discover just what I really think - if even then I'll have cleared up that question, even to myself.

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Go to: The plain brown paper envelope column.