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Hello list this interest in the history of artists and television/ broadcast media can't be allowed to go by without commenting on what I have become used to thinking of as the Media-Art-Identity-Crisis where networked communication veers between being one-to-one and one-to-many, and thereby becoming a 'broadcast', in effect... I think that this fluidity between privacy and publicity is affecting how we view the Media (mass) as well as the media/medium of networked communication as it has evolved to become more mediated through social media programs. This is not new but has obviously evolved over the past decade. Before that people communicating on mailing lists didn't seem to be so conscious of broadcasting their views - that was incidental - whereas today the mood is one of promotion of ways of viewing things in a more public sense. This is no doubt part of the artist's interest in the mass media as part of the way we live our lives; how our views are structured, nurtured and disseminated. It is inevitably the desire to structure individual's involvement, so that networks evolve. But it is such a complex interaction between content and 'consumer' that relationships can only be said to become blurred, and increasingly so, so that reality tv begins to blur with facebook (e.g.Paolo Cirio's The Big Plot), where what seems to be occuring is a complex negotiation between governing interests and freedom of expression or 'free expression'. As art is mostly about the latter there is a conflict of interest which I think is causing a crisis, in terms of what people want - for example > to make their own entertainment, or be free to structure their own entertainment which then leads to a personal YouTube data-object relationship. It is perhaps then important to share this experience, or is it? Is it then more like art and less like mass media? Or should we accept this complex hybridity of (mass) Media and Art as here to stay as-it-were? 'New Media Art' implies that this acceptance has taken or is taking place. Where once there were only a few artists (comparatively) concerned with mass mediums this area of inquiry deals with a crisis of communicationality (sorry - I don't know how else to sum it up) where data object relating is replacing analogue object relating. That AOR gives us a model for DOR in art practice is of course very significant to understanding contemporary enculturation. best regards Sarah