I began writing the German original of Audiovisions in October 1988 and finished in January 1989.10 1994, a second edition appeared, but only a few typographical errors were corrected. When an English translation of the book was projected, I was very tempted to use the opportunity to rewrite the text completely. However, there were two good reasons for not doing so. After looking at it again closely, I realised that it was a lively reflection of the situation in which it had been written - the period of radical change that the media had been caught up in on the threshold to the 19905. It was a quality that I wanted very much to preserve. In the intervening years, fragments of the German original have been translated into several languages and I have been urged many times by English-speaking colleagues to make the entire book available for international discussion. This is the other reason why I decided to leave the Orientation and the four major historical chapters in their original form; only a very few facets that I consider to be indispensable have been added.

Completely new, however, is the concluding chapter. For the decade that is now drawing to a close, I wanted to discuss some of the themes and texts pertaining to the reality of the audiovisual media with which I have engaged in the years since Audiovisions was written; shifts in the structure of the media themselves as well as in the way in which I think about them. In the 1990s, the sated and seemingly equilibrated centres of political and cultural geography, despite their inner contradictions, were stirred up by forces from their periphery and plunged into perturbation. The dismantling of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe, terrible wars over the re-distribution of newly emerged sovereignties and dependencies, particularly in the Balkans, the fall of the Wall in East Berlin, and a new attempt by the USA - this time in Iraq - to consolidate its international influence with military aggression, all deeply shook real world conditions. In such a momentously existential context, it is indeed a marginal point, but these events did in fact silence the heated discourses which would have stylised the increasingly busy traffic of signs into a reality that dominated everything (moreover, with their fashionable and catchy phrases, they were partly responsible for cynically consigning many young academics from cultural studies to unemployment).