Hi Pat, thanks for your comment. As I have just explained to Dave White, annoyingly I decided to cross post this entry and have ended up with a comment from you here and a comment from him there http://bit.ly/rpTpdX Arg! Responding to you here, yes I agree that fluency is a good word for this discussion. Re the digital vs the computational, I can't help but think that much of human physiology is probably computational, just as Marvin Minsky has pointed out that we are just machines made of meat. I like to remember that most of my functionality is pre-programmed and happens without my direction - such as digesting my lunch for example - and in that sense I would suggest that programmed = computational. The more we learn about machines, the more we learn about bodies, and the closer they get to each other. Does that make sense? Thanks for your comment.

Dave, thanks for your comment. Of course, trying to be clever I put my post on 2 different blogs and now I have a comment from you on this one and a comment from Pat Parslow on my general blog http://travelsinvirtuality.typepad.com/suethomas/2011/08/talking-transliteracy-with-dajbelshaw-patparslow-hrheingold-daveowhite-ambrouk-.html. Arg! So I'll respond to you here and to Pat there! The first post and comments make for an interesting meander through all the different states of being we struggle with in relation to technology. I especially like your suggestion of 'composite reality' since that is kind of what reality always is, isn't it? But the discourse still has this sense of regarding the products of techne as 'new' when they are very often just reworkings of other things. (And as a Prof of ~New~ Media I certainly suffer from this!) Re visitors and residents - I've read your work on this before and like the notion very much. In my last book, Hello World, I wrote about individual users going through a maturation process from being like children online, then adolescents, then adults, in terms of their personal journeys in cyberspace. I totally agree with you about the motivation issue and it's about personality too, and an interesting willingness to leap in and try things. With regard to age differentials etc, you might enjoy the comments from our 2000 survey http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/survey.htm in the section about what worries and excites people about the internet. thanks again for responding.

Thanks Steve. Other names I've received elsewhere are William Gibson and Sherry Turkle. Interesting that 2/3 of these are nonfiction, and I must admit I did have nonfiction in mind when I asked the question.