Text page
Plant - Net Gains (New Statesman 1995)
A New Statesman piece on electronic publishing that treats networks as a challenge to the speed, authority, and gatekeeping of academic journals.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
The page matters because it shows cyberfeminism leaving manifesto form and entering interview, journalism, and scene report. Technical subjectivity is worked out through infrastructures of writing, publishing, and lived media culture.
Public prose does the work here. Rather than operating through dense conceptual compression alone, the page links technical change to circulation, everyday practice, and the institutions that regulate who gets to speak and how quickly ideas move.
That matters because the section's feminist and technical lines were always public as well as theoretical. These pages show how Plant's interventions travelled through journalism, network culture, and reflective scene-writing.
How to read this text
Read for the infrastructure first: publishing systems, scene rules, travel, or writing process. That usually reveals the page's real theory of mediation.
Track where public explanation becomes critique. The strongest moments are the ones that turn ordinary media formats into arguments about technical culture.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 1
Abstract: Reports on the impact of electronic publishing on publication of academic journals. Computer networks and traditional journals; Experiments on models of research and debate. (AN: 9503031853) Business Source Alumni Edition NET GAINS Sadie Plant welcomes the advent of the on-line journal and the cyber-symposium Journals have occupied a unique position in the academic world.
Definition · paragraph 1
Computer networks and traditional journals; Experiments on models of research and debate. (AN: 9503031853) Business Source Alumni Edition NET GAINS Sadie Plant welcomes the advent of the on-line journal and the cyber-symposium Journals have occupied a unique position in the academic world. Low in circulation and high in status, they are also vulnerable to the effects of the telecoms revolution in both publishing and the academy.
Definition · paragraph 3
By Sadie Plant Sadie Plant teaches cultural studies at Birmingham University Copyright of New Statesman & Society is the property of New Statesman Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission.
Definition · paragraph 2
Because they are able to diminish radically the traditional publication lags, Net journals go some way toward bringing academic discourse closer to the "real time" speeds of research. With wide audiences and low costs, they also facilitate a rather more democratic process of circulation and peer review.
Definition · paragraph 2
The speed, scope, interactivity and accessibility of current debate are already allowing it to spread beyond the corridors of academic power. Combined with developments in desk-top and commercial publishing, the collapse of the Gutenberg world is already changing the tone and spread of even print-based journals.
Appears in sections
Cyberfeminism, Xenofeminism, and Technical Subjects Primary section
Sadie Plant, Amy Ireland, and the technical, gendered, and synthetic subject positions running through the archive.