For the past several years I've been trying to understand this thing as it develops. From text-based BBS to the graphical browsers that have developed from Mosaic through Netscape and Internet Explorer. They all have the same idea: to enable people to communicate. The idea of art taking place in this new way is astounding to me. It seems to be re-opening the potential that I thought had disappeared. It's an art form – and I use that term advisably that's contained within an aesthetic movement that is itself contained within, and simultaneously the harbinger of, a set of radically innovative social structures and practices – all of which are within a set of technologies evolving at an unprecedented and unpredictable pace even in an age defined by its passion for velocity and unpredictability. It is an integral set of production and distribution tools directed by aesthetic propositions, varying from hyper-hermetic, ontological concerns to the overtly political, to the broadly comic and self referential. An art form evolving within a system that is so fully totalizing and global that it contains within it every other known mass medium on the planet.

It is Marshall McLuhan's dream come true or is he spinning in his grave at a rapid pace.

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– David Ross
(from "Net Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction")