When evaluating the state of media culture today. (Voiceover).

When evaluating the state of media culture today, it is important to distinguish between different areas that each follow their own, at times related, dynamics and trajectories, whether in global activism, media theory, net criticism, cyberfeminism or under any other heading. Assuming a strictly parallel development of technological, economic and socio-cultural practices imposes an all too rigid analytical grid, which is unable to grasp the differentiations that exist between these fields.

Thus, for example, art made with digital media and the first generation of interactive installation art experienced a highpoint of excitement and attention around 1996-97 when the ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany, the ICC in Tokyo, Japan, and the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria, all opened within the span of 12 months and seemed to announce the institutional victory of a new art form. The ensuing institutional compromises meant that, in no time, a whole generation of young and fast artists took the next avant-garde of media art onto the Net and into clubs that made those centers look like dinosaurs, out of touch with an evolution that, only a moment ago, they seemed to hegemonize. Instead, the new institutions of media art have with varying success striven to define and claim their respective, locally or regionally determined, cultural territories.

In contrast, media activism has remained a constantly morphing animal, adapting to new political and technological environments, struggling with the anti-technological factions of political activism and inventing striking couplings of old and new media. Some political causes have remained the same, some media tactics have improved due to network interfaces, software developments, or the availability of satellite connections, and a lot of this work has, throughout the last ten years, been strongly dependent on and steered by the politics of the NGO movement and their benefactors as well as political beneficiaries.

Through the media critique of people like Peter Lambom Wilson, the Krokers and ADILKNO, of Armand Mattelard, Paul Virilio, and then a whole league of media and net critics (just look at the participants in the 1995 Ars Electronica symposium on The Wired World, the January 1996 Next 5 Minutes 2 conference in Amsterdam, or the 5th Cyberconference in Madrid in 1996), there evolved a critical language of the politics, the economics and the symbolic dimension of the new media hype-remember that we had the powerful concept of the "Californian Ideology," described by Barbrook and Cameron as early as the summer of 1995. A whole generation of students is now feeding on the fallout from these fruitful and ongoing debates.

At the same time, one should of course not overestimate the power of critical discourse in the face of a global, multibillion dollar game. To return to the question of art: it does not make sense to expect artists in general to formulate adequate or even successful critical and aesthetic responses to an economic or political crisis. As a field of creative practice, art is very diverse and will produce as many affirmative, critical, nihilistic or sarcastic positions as any other domain of society. When around 1996 some artists and theorists were advocating the most ludicrous and esoteric belief in a transcendental cyberspace, others were engaging the social and political reality of the emerging media society in an explicitly critical vein-the Critical Art Ensemble, Marko Peljhan, Etoy, RTMark, Knowbotic Research and the Bureau of Inverse Technology among them. Remember that it was an artist, Paul Garrin, who in 1996 alerted many people to the impending name-space crisis around what has become the escalating IC ANN fiasco.

It is a matter of perspective whether one sees media culture in crisis, or whether the last ten years are seen as a success story, which is now experiencing a consolidation of its structures. Unlike Geert, I see a whole new cultural sector that has opened up and that employs thousands of people: university and art school departments, galleries, media centers and media labs, magazines, book publication series, online journals and portals, independent Internet providers, digital art and software development companies that are inspired more by creative work than by making money--let's call them companies without a business plan. Many artists are active in this sector, which of course is partly dependent on the general social climate, and is through that affected by the slump in the new markets. But as much as the academic sector was, in general, too slow for the new media hype of the mid-1990s, it is now affected by the crisis of the to media industry at a much slower pace.

Of course, there is a continued necessity for a critical attitude toward the role of digital media and their contemporary applications. In a way, the political and ideological challenges have shifted and have come into much clearer focus over the last decade. Among a large group of media-savvy intellectuals worldwide, know-how about the technical infrastructure has broadened; the understanding of software politics, the legal system, the interlocking of different global strata of the media field and the coordinate grid of the digital media vectors is today much better understood than a few years ago. Thanks to online and print channels like Nettime, Slashdot, Telepolis, Mute, c't, and others, issues such as copyright, surveillance systems, digital rights management, media education or the cultural and social role of computer games can today be discussed in public and on an informed and differentiated level.

I am a strategic optimist. I share Geert's skepticism about the epistemic significance of file sharing that Mark points to. Although new structures of exchange and cooperation have indeed emerged, and the practice is delivering a strong blow to the established system of copyright, it is just another twist of the labyrinthine media ecology through which we are stumbling, one that will certainly lose its shine and which, in a more long-term perspective, uses only a slightly more upbeat technology than Gopher and WAIS. At the same time, I believe that it is necessary to affirm the achievements of cultural and artistic practice for a critical understanding of media (achievements in which theoretical and practical work like Geert's continues to have a significant share). A sense of differentiation, attention to details, and a good memory, are effective tools when it comes to fostering strategies for a media culture that is not driven by technological fads or the hope for short-term gains, but by the long-term desi re for a sociopolitical field in which human agency and passion are the main driving forces.

ANDREAS BROECKMANN lives and works in Berlin where, since 2000, he has been the Artistic Director of the international media art festival, transmediale. He worked with the V2_Organization in Rotterdam from 1995-2000 and has published and lectured internationally on network culture and the "machinic" aesthetics of media art.