Abstract

When the World Wide Web emerged in the early 1990s, it seemed to solve all the issues with which small press production and distribution had been haunted, from fanzines and artists books to audio cassettes, Super-8 and video filmmaking. Finally, there was a universal publishing medium that, beyond merely integrating those media, was – to quote Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s vision of “the new media” from the early 1970s – “egalitarian in structure” and allowed “anyone [… to] take part in them by a simple switching process” (Enzensberger 1970). It took, in Western countries, another decade for high speed Internet access to become ubiquitous and fulfill this promise not only structurally, via network architecture, but also practically, through affordable bandwidth and computing power.

• Florian Cramer (NL) is head of the research programme Communication in a Digital Age at the Piet Zwart institute of the Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, the Netherlands.

Full text (PDF) p.  230-231