Radical as they may be, an interactive narrative, a digital film, a virtual world or a typical Web site is still something we can deal with using traditional aesthetic theory can deal with. These are still objects created by authors for cultural consumption by users. However, no new media objects are being generated when the user follows a hyperlink to another Web site, or uses telepresence to observe or act in a remote location, or communicates in real time with other users using Internet chat, or just makes a plain old-fashioned telephone call. In short, once we begin dealing with verbs and nouns which start with "tele," we no longer deal with the traditional cultural domain of representation. Instead, we enter a new conceptual space — telecommunication. How can we start navigating it?

When we think of the decade of the 1890s, we think of the birth of cinema. In the preceding decades, and the one which immediately followed the 1890s, most other modern media technologies were developed, enabling the recording of still images of visible reality (photography) and sound (the phonograph), as well as real-time transmission of images, sounds, and text (telegraph, television, the fax, telephone and radio). Yet, more than any of these other inventions, it was the introduction of cinema which impressed itself most strongly on public memory. The year which we remember and celebrate is 1895; it is not 1875 (first television experiments of Carey) or 1907 (the introduction of the fax). Clearly, we are more impressed (or at least, we have been until the Internet) with modern media's ability to record aspects of reality and then use these recordings to simulate it for our senses, than with its real-time communication aspect. If we had a choice to be among the Lumiere's first audience or be the among the first users of the telephone, we would choose the former. Why?

The reason is that the new recording technologies led to the development of new arts in the way that real-time communication did not. The fact that aspects of sensible reality can be recorded and that these recordings can be later combined, re-shaped and manipulated — in short, edited — made possible the new media-based arts which were soon to dominate the twentieth century: fiction films, radio concerts and music programs, television serials and news programs. Despite persistent experiments of the avant-garde artists with modern technologies of real-time communication — radio in the 1920s, video in the 1970s, Internet in the 1990s — the ability to communicate over a physical distance in real-time by itself did not seem to inspire fundamentally new aesthetic principles the way film or tape recording did.

Since their beginning in the nineteenth century, modern media technologies have developed along two distinct trajectories. The first is representational technologies: film, audio and video magnetic tape, various digital storage formats. The second is real-time communication technologies, i.e. everything which begins with "tele": telegraph, telephone, telex, television, telepresence. Such new twentieth century cultural forms as radio and later television emerge at the intersections of these two trajectories. In this meeting, the technologies of real-time communication became subordinated to technologies of representation. Telecommunication was used for distribution, as with broadcasting which enabled a twentieth century radio listener or television viewer to receive a transmission in real time. But a typical program being broadcast, be it a film, a play or a musical performance, was a traditional aesthetic object, i.e. a construction which utilizes elements of familiar reality and which was created by professionals before the transmission. For instance, although following the adaptation of video tape recorders television retained some live programs such as news and talk shows, the majority of programming came to be pre-recorded.

The attempts of some artists from the 1960s onward to substitute a traditionally defined aesthetic object by other concepts such as "process," "practice," and "concept" only highlight the strong hold of the traditional concept on our cultural imagination. The concept of an aesthetic object as an object, i.e. as a self-contained structure limited in space and/or time, is fundamental to all modern thinking about aesthetics. For instance, in his Languages of Art (1976), one of the most influential aesthetic theories of the last decades, philosopher Nelson Goodman names the following four symptoms of the aesthetic: syntactic density, semantic density, syntactic repleteness and the ability to exemplify. These characteristics assume a finite object in space and/or time: a literary text, a musical or dance performance, a painting, a work of architecture. For another example of how modern aesthetic theory relies on the concept of a fixed object we can look at the very influential article "From Work to Text" by Roland Barthes. In this article Barthes establishes an opposition between a traditional notion of a "work" and a new notion of "text," about which he advances seven "propositions." As can be seen from these propositions, Barthes’s notion of a "text" is an attempt to go beyond traditional aesthetic object understood as something clearly delineated from other objects semantically and physically — and yet ultimately Barthes retains the traditional concept. Proposition (1) states: "The work can be held in hand, the text is held in language, only exists in the movement of discourse." "Text" is ruled by metonymy (3) (think of hyperlinking) ; it aims at dissemination of meanings and is fundamentally intertextual (4) (recall another Barthes’s quote already cited in "Selection" section); it does not have a single Author (5); it "requires that one try to abolish (or at the very least to diminish) the distance between writing and reading" (6), the distance which, as Barthes notes, is a recent historical invention. Like a post-serial musical score which makes a performer into its co-author, "text" "asks of the reader a practical collaboration" (6). Given this last proposition in particular, many interactive new media objects qualify as "texts" in Barthes’s definition. Yet his notion of a "text" still assumes a reader "reading," in most general sense, something which was previously "written." In short, while a "text" is interactive, hypertextual, distributed, and dynamic (to translate Barthes’s propositions into new media terms), it is still a finite object.