Lost in the Net

In Sobcheck's discussion of 'getting lost' I was immediately left wondering whether or not the uncanny experience of loss, the loss of identity and selfhood, was possible in an internet space. From my experience, being 'lost' in the internet is much more of the first order of being lost, the one she sort of subordinates as an experience, the desire to 'find' something but being unable to reach it. This is brought into view pretty neatly by the frustration I feel when I can't find the page/source I'm looking for, when the internet resists my attempts to implement it. It's not a true powerless feeling, it's a refusal not a 'loss' proper, certainly not a loss of ground, since I'm still in my seat, grounded spatially, and I can always turn away in disgust and defeat, or I can always reload my 'homepage' with the click of a interface button.

Body seems like this anchor point of promised return when surfing the 'net. In cyberpunk fiction, the fact of the body remains a problem that is difficult to solve. It's the thing you want to transcend, but also the sanctuary to which you can always return (or hope you can return to). It takes on, in this role, a sort of maternal role, a womb to which our 'free mind' both wishes to return and wishes to disown in favor of the realm of code and pure, masculine reason. This is, of course, a very problematic reading, since it assumes the subject in question is a subject of male desire, and risks ignoring other kinds of subjectivity/defining 'male' subjecthood as something necessarily separate. But there may be something in the idea of the body's place in the ontology of cyberspace, what role it plays in our conceptions of home and away and getting lost.