One of the difficulties I've encountered as I've tried to write this particular column is the question of to what extent the web truly encompasses everything, or perhaps more to the point, how it encompasses. There's encompassing that homogenizes, more or less through putting everything into a blender and converting everything into the same mush. That's a different encompassing than a salad that includes numerous components that at least to a certain extent maintain their identity. Then again, the salad needs a dressing that makes it into a whole, something greater than the sum of its parts, and I'm not sure it would be correct to claim that the web becomes something greater. Maybe it's really nothing beyond a big pot where everything gets thrown in, and not only doesn't melt, but doesn't even get stirred. So we may be adopting metaphors for the web that suggest a mixing of components, when all that's really happening is that we've finally found a container big enough to include everything. And if I'm dealing with the immensity of the internet it's hard not to mention the Jorge Luis Borges story "On Exactitude in Science" in which he writes about a map so complete that it was a 1:1 representation of the world. Of course when something reaches that scale it may be exact, but ultimately it doesn't represent anything.