On a BBS, any subscriber may initiate a discussion topic, no matter how arcane, in which other subscribers may participate. If the bulletin board in question is plugged into the Internet, their comments will be read and responded to by computer users scattered across the Internet. The roles of reader, writer, and critic are so quickly interchangeable that they become increasingly irrelevant in a community of co-creation. A personal computer can be configured to act as a publishing house, a broadcast-quality TV studio, a professional recording studio, or the node in an international computer bulletin board system. Increasingly, 'zines are being published on-line, to be bounced around the world via the Internet.
Any person can be a publisher.
It's better than the media we now have. It is this yearning for meaning and cohesion that lies at the heart of the jammer's attempts to reassemble the fragments of our world into something more profound than the luxury cars, sexy technology, and overdesigned bodies that flit across our screens. Hackers who expose governmental wrongdoing, textual slashers, wheatpaste snipers, billboard bandits, media hoaxers, subvertisers, and unannounced political protestors who disrupt live newscasts remind us that numberless stories go untold in the daily papers and the evening news, that what is not reported speaks louder than what is. These guerrilla semioticians are in pursuit of new myths stitched from the material of their own lives, a fabric of experiences and aspirations where neither the depressive stories of an apolitical intelligentsia nor the repressive fictions of corporate media's Magic Kingdom obtain.