Andrew Fearnside wrote:

The internet does not allow us to be "here and everywhere else at the
same time." Our bodies remain physically wherever we are, until we die.

True, we can see images on rectangular screens of any almost any
dimension from all over the world; we can hear the sounds of languages
and ecologies from all over the world; we can see the works of thousands
of artists, famous and not famous, from all over the world. But please
don't mystify the experience! Seeing a Quicktime movie of an eagle
carrying a barrel 20' in diameter can only spark us, not turn us into
beings of light travelling everywhere instantaneously. Hearing
TrueSpeech files of a Tibetan poet does not allow us to understand
Tibetan. The internet is not going to change that next year, ten years
from now, or fifty. […]

What has bothered me reading the posts to RHIZOME over the past few
months is the heights to which Mr. Nechvatal and others are taking the
Internet and the new media it supports. […]

It seems that we all agree, reading the delicious fantasies posted on
this list, that new media and the Internet are guaranteed to develop for
us a higher level of being, where social self fades away and a global
self emerges. With the internet the sprawling marketplace it currently
is, I fail to see how that is possible. The only way to take one's self
to a higher level of being is to find a practice and engage it fully,
oneself.

[…]

So all I'm saying is: WE are not acquiring anything through the
Internet/new media. Cultures are not becoming one because computer
owners can shop for anything anywhere; instead cultures are continuing
to distort and destroy each other, with little help from the shoppers.
Individuals, and the collective, can only grow, finally, by the
individual will of each. […]

John Priestley responded:

I'm not sure it's such an either/or situation. I agree that "cultures
are not becoming one", but what is happening may be more radically
pernicious/ecstatic than that: one culture is becoming more becoming
than the others. A homogeneous (Western male techno) culture is being
broadcast, despite our mythologies of diversity and interactivity, more
thoroughly than ever before.

And colonialism is being extended/dispersed by the commodification of
the sensible world through digitization and distribution. Distortion
and destruction are nothing new, nor have "cultures" ever been integral.
So I agree with you that this is a continuation/extension of past
cultural interface; but that doesn't mean that it's not also a new venue
that promulgates new configurations of subjectivity and culture.

Same old song, new dance craze.

Joseph Nechvatal also responded to Fearnside:

Are you only your body? Are you not also your digital artifacts - which
can sustain and be available globally to many people simultaneously?

In one of his 1940 manifestos, Lucio Fontana called for a "Spatialist
Era" in which the artist would unchain art and free it into space. I
think we are there now. This new and bold idea of a dematerialized
hyperart is best understood by something Fontana said in a 1969
interview though: "To unchain art from matter is to unchain the sense of
the eternal from the mere preoccupation with the immortal."

The idea of the body in cyberspace is both an old and a new one. It is
old with respect to the fantastical aspects projectable into the
qualities of an ideal body - this we know from any kind of fantasy
fiction. On the other hand it is radically new through its
personification within the virtual reality of interactive, computer
constructed environments.

[…]

For me the internet offers us the potential of long-term societal change
which will undoubtedly have untold spiritual implications in an age
where every user may become a server to all other users. Art may mean
etymologically: to bring together, to put together, to share our time
and thoughts and cares. In a virtual art community this has the
implication of responsibility and respect.

Being online means being together without an agenda and it serves a need
to break the contradictions of the real world with ideals of freedom
from time and rules and constraints.

[…]