Through my experience as a net.journalist, I've come to realise that the lack of knowledge about new media amongst a majority of people is becoming an ever larger obstacle in my work. It is also an obstacle to networkers in general, because it indirectly obstructs the development of the net.

Extending the net to the 'real' world could help solve this problem. I hope to see groups and individuals building and sustaining connections between new/old media and the physical, public space outside of it.

Secondly, I hope there will be an awareness and a better structure of archiving the processes and sharing experience to help spread a more thorough understanding about the development, set up and work being done with the net and the world wide web.
Both strategies could prevent the net from becoming a technically and socially inbred, and thus paralysed, entity. It offers us the challenge of finding new languages, in any sense of the word, to express and extend net.culturally specific moods, techniques and fresh traditions outside the net.

A good example of a group that is very active is XRL, eXtended Live Radio, an experiment between people in Ljubljana and Berlin. For two weeks in September 1997 they had a full program of performances and broad and webcasts. (Hardly a trace of it can still be found ...) The following stems from an e-mail interview with Ulf Freyhoff and Monika Glahn, the Berlin connection of the group:

"There were two main concerns, live-web-radio and live-fm-radio. The first week we broadcast from a studio at Radio Student, the second week from a public space, the Kapelica Gallery, both in Ljubljana. We invited people from all over the world to participate and contribute, it took some days until contacts to other places started to work, so for the first few days we were producing the whole program ourselves. The shape of the program consisted of monologues, lectures or readings, discussions, music and experimental live-mix, as well as interviews. After a few days, when our web-contacts started to work out, it changed depending on who was online when and what was happening at other spaces. We transmitted everything on the ether, no censorship. At the same time it was very important to us to make the process transparent, to tell something about the measures that had to be taken to make the transmissions possible, and about the possibilities in general.

"The physical space is the most important part for us, and it doesn't necessarily need to be connected on the net. The connection via internet of two or more physical spaces allows those spaces to be synchronised - at least partly and for a certain time. It's an image, located in real time and real space, for and about information, experience, networks and communication. Translation. Inside and outside. Crossing and melting borders."

In order to broaden the impact of independent media practice, it seems increasingly important to link media activities to physical, (semi-) public spaces.

Josephine Bosma [jesis@xs4all.nl]