While I’m all for new and innovative art forms, I can’t help but feel troubled by the impact internet culture has had on writing and the written word. Whether or not E-Lit is here to stay, it does point to a new mode of reading which is not necessarily advantageous. I’d have to agree with Leo–I think there’s something about the word “scan” which seems to go against everything reading now stands for.

What may be at stake in this new mode of disseminating information, over and above the question of quality, is our very attention spans. After all, should we be proud that in this internet age, we often cannot even stay on one webpage long enough to finish it to completion? I’m not sure I’d prefer to experience literature in such a haphazard manner. Somehow it would no longer be literature.

And I am not claiming that this new trend is anything other than a logical evolution in how we read and how we present information. I do know that by developing rapid reading skills, it helps exercise the brain to situate information in context, thereby helping an individual remember and retain information more efficiently than by straight reading off the page, word for word.

It’s all good stuff and is worthy of further reflection, research and the like. It may even influence how we write as authors going forward. Maybe we need to catch up with some of the younger artists out there in order for our own works to become more relevant.

Great questions! My piece was more of an explanation of what e-lit is, an overview of sorts (hence all the hyperlinks to e-lit examples).

For argument’s sake, do you think that we are looking at this from the point of view of a generation who is still more familiar with books in paper format than in electronic format? Last year, my husband partook in usability tests for a user guide and he noticed a clear demarcation between the way people over 30 read and the way people under 30 scan, because that’s how the newer generations “reads” now: they scan. So maybe an organized and logical (and logic is relative, isn’t it?) structure is not for them.

“Novels” or stories used to be written entirely in verse in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Then the verse became prose and the prose became shorter and shorter. You rarely see books as thick and elaborate as the Victorian novel anymore. Literature has indeed evolved, but why should we believe that it stops here? Why wouldn’t it continue to evolve?

There are indeed scholars reflecting on the matter, see the Electronic Literature Organization and the Laboratoire de recherches sur les œuvres hypermédiatiques.

A couple of things struck me with this piece (other than the reviewer’s penchant for using hyperlinks) – do these writers/creators have any sense of how human beings read? Or are they simply leveraging the surfing mentality of youth, who skim from web page to messaging tile to essay-in-progress to Facebook without taking the time to absorb what they are ingesting from all those sources?

The invention of new sources of how information can be communicated to the eye and the brain, and its subsequent shaping by creative minds as hinted at here, is interesting in itself. But the lasting persistence of the book, and by extension, words set out on a page in a logical order and structure such that the human brain can take in, absorb, reflect, and in turn, re-submit and argue, is testimony to centuries of experimentation and evolution to arrive at a form of communication that works for all. The use of dynamic linking, and the Internet itself, is so new that this is what I would term bleeding edge artistic experimentation.

Other than the artists themsleves, I don’t see a lot of reflection or theory on this point and it would be useful to see if researchers are delving into this question, to see if, in response to our persistent and rapid development of new technology, human beings are beginning the next stage of how we read, how we absorb information and artistic content.