What is the role of extra-medial representation?
Thus, against the recent trends in new media studies to view new media as the coming together of coding and media storage and to downplay the significance of utopian and dystopian imaginings of cyberspace, this book insists on the importance of extra-medial representation, for the Internet (as cyberspace) existed within the public’s imagination before it became a regular public practice.43 The Internet was sold as “theory come true,” as the future in the present arrived as expected. During the 1990s, inflated promises, usually automatically accompanied by knowing disappointment, sold the Internet. Much scholarly work, for instance, claimed electronic texts literalized a theoretical ideal. Influential and insightful early work on hypertext argued that hypertext epitomized Roland Barthes’s writerly text; almost every major museum claimed and still claims that its website is André Malraux’s museum without walls. Rhizome.org is/was one of the most influential net.art sites and Critical Art
