Thanks, Tom, for the reference to the Routledge anthology on Network  
Art--I've pre-ordered it :)

Another anthology just published by a British press is 60: Innovators  
Shaping our Creative Future, produced for Thames & Hudson's 60th  
anniversary. This doorstopper includes a handful of artists who use  
networks--not surprising, given that Joline Blais and I wrote the New  
Media section. What I find more telling is how painfully derivative  
the "innovators" featured in the Visual Arts section are.

That said, one of the points Joline and I try to make in our section  
is that the latest generation of new media innovators are applying  
lessons learned from the Internet back to the real world. An excerpt  
follows--more about the book here:

http://www.thamesandhudson.com/9780500514924.html

++++++
Excerpt from 60: Innovators Shaping our Creative Future
Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito

It's difficult to think of any field where innovation occurred in the  
last decade and new media--whether wielded by artists or architects,  
developers or dressmakers--did not play a critical role. But what of  
innovation within the field of new media itself? Who offers vision to  
the next generation of visionaries?

The first wave of new media practitioners in the 1980s and 90s  
fashioned tools to network the globe in a pervasive electronic glow.  
As this wave spread, it ramified--from a data packet sent from UCLA to  
Stanford, to a tangle of Web pages joined via hyperlinks, to a  
community-edited constellation of images, sounds, and news, to a swarm  
of satellite-enabled handhelds capable of mapping environmental  
destruction and coordinating political movements. As virtual reality  
gave way to augmented reality, the archetypal new media user went from  
a white male "data cowboy" with no social life to a Japanese teenage  
girl with too much social life. Gawky VR helmets have given way to  
Treos and iPhones, and people use these stylish wireless devices not  
to escape bodies but to find them.

The latest wave takes this networked community and extends it further  
into the real world and its denizens, human and nonhuman. These  
innovators think quite literally outside the box, recognizing that new  
media were never about communicating with machines, but with other  
beings. But something has changed. In the first wave, the "new" in new  
media placed undue emphasis on the ephemeral--exemplified by the  
accelerating cycle of obsolescence of hardware, software, and  
everything built with them. The latest wave, on the other hand, sees  
nothing new in newness. Change is everywhere: in energy descent,  
climate change, corporate overreach, and constantly mutating  
technologies. The challenge for this generation is how to accommodate  
change--how to grow the agility and robustness of networks from a  
proof of concept into a long-term strategy for survival.

For networks are the battlefields where these creators wage war.  
Networks offer a level playing field that favors the innovative,  
whether that field is made of bits, sod, or kin. Ten dollars will buy  
you a domain name, whether it's GWBush.com, GATT.org, or  
TheWorstDomainName.net--an egalitarian ethic that empowers The Yes Men  
to impersonate presidential candidates, multinational corporations,  
and influential NGOs. The artists of 0100101110101101 faced down a  
50,000 euro lawsuit from Nike, thanks in part to the anonymity of the  
Internet. By networking a dozen law students across the US, Wendy  
Seltzer can protect inventors from the chilling effects of  
intellectual property law by exposing the overreaching tactics of  
corporate lawyers. Natalie Jeremijenko lays soil on sidewalks and  
invites geese to a human lunch, reminding us that our food webs  
include the flora and fauna in driveways and rooftops. And Miigam'agan  
and gkisedtanamoogk are rebuilding the Longhouse, one of the most  
successful networks of the past 10,000 years, starting with little  
more than their own convictions and good will.

[....]the Internet is less a technology for wiring routers via packet- 
switching as much as a technology for social intelligence. So perhaps  
we shouldn't be surprised that the Internet built by white male  
engineers is a barely sustainable system beset by viruses, spam, and  
vitriol. It is precisely social intelligence that Euro-ethnic culture  
lacks, and that the Wabanaki remember: the Longhouse is *their*  
Internet. In place of flamewars, indigenous people had talking  
circles; instead of money, they had trust. Rather than entrust care of  
their networks to top-down organizations like ICANN and Verizon, the  
Wabanaki created an inverse hierarchy, where decisions by the highest  
intertribal council could always be overruled by local communities.  
Their vision is broad, their communities dense. They recognize that  
the real doomsday invention of the 20th century was not the nuclear  
bomb, but the nuclear family.

Nevertheless, the digital media newly birthed by Euro-ethnic culture  
offer many practical strategies that innovators from all networked  
cultures gladly exploit. These creators don't fashion rarities for the  
white cube or its elite gatekeepers, but unleash their executable  
creations on the email inboxes and street corners of ordinary folks.  
Junkyards and e-commerce sites aren't subjects they paint or sculpt,  
but sites where they act. As we argue in the book _At the Edge of  
Art_, the Internet has enabled creative people to make and distribute  
work far outside art's traditional confines. To be sure, there's no  
gallery to fund high-tech installations, and the lack of a "dot-art"  
domain to go with "dot-com" and "dot-org" means viewers have to decide  
for themselves what is or isn't art. But these constraints have also  
freed new media artists from the art world's narrow purview and  
dependence on the market, helping them learn to survive in a world  
much bigger than the its cloistered hothouse. Much as art world  
cognoscenti find titillation in a set of handcuffs or a Barbie doll on  
a gallery floor, new media artists aim to do more than retrieve a new  
readymade into the Duchampian frame[....]

In his 1946 essay "As We May Think," Vannevar Bush pinned the cause  
for the last century's two world wars on the fact that human  
intelligence was separated socially and geographically. His vision of  
the Memex heralded a global network of distributed information. The  
cyberspace of the 20th century was a first draft of this vision, but  
today's real innovators in new media are taking taking that vision  
back down to the earth and all its beings. That cross-species  
intelligence is our past--and our future.