As video technology emerged, so did new means of distribution. Fax machines have become a source of information powerful enough apparently to prevent a coup d'etat in Russia. New digital media continue to emerge, and networks continue to grow and link up to each other. Artists experiment with the new technologies, as they have done historically. Virtual galleries have appeared on the World Wide Web, and works are produced in collaborations between persons who may never meet in physical space.
Electronic art reveals with striking clarity that the stuff of culture is information.
The networked distribution of digital media has the potential of completing the democratization of culture that began with mechanical reproduction, and of restoring the primacy of communication over commodity value. Whether this happens hangs in the balance today. Neither side has control of the situation, though it is clear where the preponderance of power lies. If this comes about, it will clearly not be the clockwork sense positive science set in motion in the Industrial Revolution, nor the dialectical sense critics such as Benjamin discerned for the first Technological Age, but a sense that rises from contradictions unique to our own age. The chaos at the heart of the new machine is not a chaos anyone has danced with before.