Hannah--
What amuses me most/first here is the chaotic messiness of this paper, in which you draw on two very different theoretical sources (Ausland and Stone) to really go adventuring into dimensions that aren't quite clear to you yet; as you say, "definitely an exploration and an experiment"--much riskier than the more carefully controlled/shaped papers you wrote earlier in the semester, and a perfect example of form expressing function.

The analogies you work with--Moby-Dick and the internet as "interfaces" where nature and machinery, the self and world intersect and express one another--are not exact, but the crack/mis-match is where the exciting thinking happens (Leonard Cohen: "There's a crack in everything, that's how light gets in...."). I think you'll find it a pleasure to read Al Keefe's Unmasking the Mask (the Interaction Between Blogging and Performance); much of what she has to say there intersects fruitfully with your own speculations about the liberation that opacity can offer, and about the ability to express oneself more fully online than off.

For all my readings of Moby-Dick, I hadn't yet noted the increasingly mechanical nature of Ahab and the crew; thanks for calling my attention to that pattern. I also especially like the analogy you draw between Ahab's attempt to destroy the whale--and so get rid of the evil he represents--and the goals of those who would destroy the internet in order to get rid of the problems it causes: "the interface," as you wisely observe, "is not the source of the problems"; "to destroy life, as Ahab does, in order to avoid the problems that arise from it, is insane."

Perhaps most intriguing to me--and where I'd encourage you to go on thinking, had I the opportunity to assign you just one more paper!--is your following Stone in thinking about the messy/inaccurate opposition between nature and machine. When the mind works (as Ahab's does) in "endless repetitions," does it actually become "less human" (as you claim) or "more so," in its incessent thinking?

I know I'm not the only one "here" who can't stop thinking, who lies awake @ night unable to turn off her brain. It may be then that I become most myself, or most quintessentially human (unlike animals that have figured out the "cost of smarts").  If "human nature is fully functioning" when "technology mediates the function" (as you cleverly observe) then might it not also be fully functioning when the mediator is the unruly, unstoppable brain?

These questions are not unrelated to my final one. You say that the organic process of interaction in a blog--there being "no telling where a conversation will end up by looking at the first entry," for instance, is "usually productive instead of destructive"; what makes for the difference?