The Interwebs

I'm thinking about the internet and how it blurs the line between fiction and reality. More specifically, I'm thinking of Paige Railstone, publishing, and John Green.
DJ Railstone intrigues me. Am I more real than she is? I, after all, am not a DJ and have never been to Estonia. Her life is probably more interesting than mine is. She has more internet presence than I do. She has more fans than I do. Is she real? Am I real? Or am I an effort by myself and the people around me to create something that fills a space? This concept is making my head spin just a little. If Milton had his own website and facebook and twitter, would he be real? If Hogwarts was a real castle with real students going to school there, might Harry Potter be real?
Publishing is interesting. I really don't think that novel legnth fiction is dead, but I think that it's changing. I think it's possible that it would be normal to read most books on a FanFiction.net type website. Everyone could publish things and make money off of them, but the ones being the most sucessful would be the ones who have the most readers, getting the most advertising revenue. I'm not sure if this site would be free to read or not, but if it was, you've got a lot of your copyright issues gone right there. Still, the idea of never having a paper book to hold and read and hi-lite (okay, I can't write in most books, but some people do) sort of bugs me. And yes, I think it's cool that the internet messes with things that have been the same, physically, for hundreds of years.
John Green makes fictional characters real. It's not his writing, although that's good. It's stuff like Omnictionary, having facebook pages for fictional people, having nerdfighters, having the school in Looking for Alaska be remarkably close to a real school. This is really cool. Authors like John Green and Jackson Pearce (although her book isn't out yet, so I have not idea how real the characters will become) feel like real people, and that is really, really cool.