Note: This text is an expanded version of a talk given at the Banff
Centre for the Arts Interactive Screen 0.0 workshop (August 2000), and
the introduction to the -target.audience=0- panel at net.congestion -
International Festival of Streaming Media, in Amsterdam, October 2000.
The text will appear shortly in the third Acoustic Space issue,
published by the E-lab artist organisation in Riga, Latvia.

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Presence in the mediated environment of digital networks is probably one
of the most complex phenomena of the new types of social interaction
that have emerged in these environments. In the current phase of radical
deployment (or penetration) of the internet, various attempts are made
to come to terms with the social dynamics of networked communication
spaces. It seems that traditional media theory is not able to
contextualise these social dynamics, as it remains stuck on a meta-level
discourse of media and power structures (Virilio), hyperreality
(Baudrillard), or on a retrograde analysis of media structures deeply
rooted in the functionality and structural characteristics of broadcast
media (McLuhan).

Attempts to come to terms with networked communication environments from
the field of social theory, are generally shallow, ill informed about
actual practices, and sometimes to straightforwardly biased. Psychology
does not contribute in any significant way to an understanding of these
social dynamics either. The rather popular idea, for instance, that the
screen is a projection screen for personal pre-occupations, and that
social relations that emerge through the interactions via networked
media are mostly imaginary for lack of negative feedback or corrections,
is deeply contentious. The idea that absence of corrective feedback
stimulates the creation of fictitious relationships is an interesting
one, but one that can apply equally well off-line as it can on-line. It
illuminates certain patterns of human behaviour, but it does not tell us
much of what makes presence in the networks specific.

One of the greatest fallacies of current attempts to understand the
social dynamics of networked media is the tendency to see these media as
an extension of the broadcast media system. This idea has become more
popular as the internet is extended with audio-visual elements.
Interactive audio-visual structures, streaming media, downloadable sound
and video, all contribute to the notion that the internet is the next
evolution of broadcast media. But this vision applies only partially,
and is driven primarily by vested interests of the media industry. It is
often not reflected in how people actually use the net.

The predication of the conception of media on the broadcast model based
on a division of roles of the active sender and passive receiver /
audience relationship, is the greatest barrier to understanding what
goes down in a networked media environment. The networked environment
should primarily be seen as a social space, in which active
relationships are pursued and deployed. Activities that often seem
completely useless, irrational, erratic, or even autistic. The active
sender and the passive audience/ receiver, seems to have been replaced
by a multitude of unguided transmission that seem to lack a designated
receiver. Thus the net is seen as an irrelevant, chaotic, and useless
infosphere, a waste of resources, a transitory phase of development that
will soon be replaced by professional standards of quality,
entertainment, information, media-professionalism, and above all respect
for the audience.

Let me be clear, I do not believe in this vision, and I am convinced
that the net will not evolve into the ultimate entertainment and
information medium. Instead it seems more likely that the seemingly
unstructured mess of random transmissions will prevail.

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Into the Soup….

The ideal of seeing