Drawing on a study of 110 Web homepage authors and their personal homepages, this chapter reports on a rhetorical strategy adopted by solo authors to claim a niche on the Web. This rhetoric consists of what social semioticians Robert Hodge and Gunther Kress would characterize as low-modality messages, messages whose low fidelity with the world they nominally represent signals social tension. Without the resources to mount "real" rhetorical appeals competitive with those of institutions, solo authors construct instead distorted "virtual" appeals--virtual logos, virtual ethos, and virtual pathos--derived from institutional discourses. Through Bakhtin's dialogic perspective, these distorted appeals can be understood as parodies of authentic institutional discourses. These parodies contest the version of social reality, the ideology of who and how one fits in within the media, promulgated by mainstream institutions. Applied to the classroom, student-composed Web parody can foster students' sense of agency and critical awareness of computer-mediated communication.