A recent post by Rocket Kids alerted me to an article in today's Boston Glove, Lost in the Blogospere by Sven Birkerts, on literature in the blogosphere and whether it is different from traditional literature:
The blogosphere, I would argue, works in the opposite direction. There are arbiters aplenty -- some of the smartest print writers are active on blogs as well -- but the very nature of the blogosphere is proliferation and dispersal; it is centrifugal and represents a fundamental reversal of the norms of print culture.
Proliferation -- the chaos of the endlessly branching paths -- is one crucial structural difference between the print and digital realms. Never mind that the Web has swallowed vast archives of print material; we are also seeing a significant shift in the nature of the discourse itself. Blogs and on-line journals do not simply transfer old wine into new bottles -- the wine itself is changing.
Sven ("I am in every way a man of print, shaped by its biases and hierarchies, tinged by its not-so-buried elitist premises.") Birkerts accurately sees the Internet triggering a paradigm shift within the literary world. But he is incorrectly attributing this shift to the conversation.
The conversation in literature has always been wide and drifting, just take a look at the endnotes/footnotes of a literary critique. The only difference is that if you want to follow up on an endnote found in print, then you must locate the book that is being referred to. Blogs simply reduce the time needed to connect ideas together. Yes, this is a major change but I would argue that a change in the speed of a conversation is not in itself a paradigm shift.
The real paradigm shift, as I see it, is taking place in the diffusion of literature. Daily Lit is a great example of the way that the internet will change literature. Daily Lit is tearing down the walls of the castle. The publishers, reviewers, and critics who once served as the gate keepers in the industry will no longer have the ability to limit a person's ability to distribute their work. New novelists can distribute their books through RSS to great numbers of readers in a formal, non-blogosphere, manner. Add a banner advertisment to each post on the RSS feed and you'll have a profitable site with none of the traditional costs of a publishing house. Prepare to see more "Daily Lits" pop up in the years to come.
Additionally, sites such as Good Reads provide a forum for people to review books and share opinions with friends and other readers. Personally, I would trust the opinion of 300 people over the opinion of Sven Birkerts and thus Good Reads works well for me.
Sven shouldn't be so scared of becoming irrelevant. Literature in the blogosphere isn't changing the nature of literature itself. There will always be a market for professional/academic reviewers and critics. The only real change taking place is the means in which literature and opinions are proliferated.
