Mass culture pushes quantity, while high culture extols quality. For both, the use of the cultural object as a sign of individual identity and status precedes its capacity to inform. The division of culture and the contradiction between culture as commodity and culture as communication is determined not by any differences in the intelligence or creative capacity of persons, but by the ownership of the technologies of production and distribution. Electronic reproduction and networked communications now promise to push the contradictions of culture and society to new extremes. Digital electronic media don't merely reproduce, they clone.
Every digital artwork is an original.
At the same time, media are proliferating faster than they can be regulated. Proposals to regulate the Internet founder on the realization that, like multinational corporations, it no longer falls under the jurisdiction of any one country. Internet access may become as basic and cheap a service as telephone service, and provide a means of distribution of information that will affect society as profoundly as did the invention of the printing press. The means to produce digital information is already available to anyone for less than the price of an automobile. Conceivably, devices to exchange digital information may become as common as telephones.