(no subject)
Well, here we go into the wide, wonderful world of Internet publishing. What, you think this is not publishing? Au contraire, blogs and such offer the opportunity for anyone with a computer and modem to present their writing to the public. Well, the on-line public, anyway; but the on-line public is huge.
I haven't really ever thought about it before, but this technology - the Internet - has qualitatively changed literary communication, in the same manner as did the printing press. I could, in this journal, write a novella or a play or a poem and present it to anyone who cared to read it, unmediated by editor, proofreader, or publisher. A direct link between author and audience, and divil tak' the critics! I suppose you could thus call the Internet a "Reformed" - as in "Reformation" - technology.
Of course, this also means, I suspect, that there is a lot of crap out there as well - the editor's job is to pull up the weeds and prune the overgrowth. And I imagine that there are an awful lot of poorly tended plots, out there. (Pun intentional).
What will be interesting to see is how the Web influences the stylistic conventions of this new literature. Line justification, capitalization of the first letter of a sentence, paragraph indentations - the printing press created a need for these to be standardized. The medium shapes the message. And the Internet will do the same to Web literature, I am sure.
For example, I just previewed this entry, and LiveJournal removed all the indentations that I put at each paragraph. Back in high school, when I was learning to type on a typewriter, I was very carefully taught to indent each graf five spaces. But I don't think I've ever seen an email that is indented - the most common style seems to be a line of empty space between each graf.
Vocabulary, too. Above, I sought for a word to describe the interaction between author and audience on the Internet, and the word that sprang to mind was "link". Not "conversation" or "dialogue" or "contact"; "link", which has gained a new meaning and a new connotation in the Internet age.
This is interesting stuff.
I haven't really ever thought about it before, but this technology - the Internet - has qualitatively changed literary communication, in the same manner as did the printing press. I could, in this journal, write a novella or a play or a poem and present it to anyone who cared to read it, unmediated by editor, proofreader, or publisher. A direct link between author and audience, and divil tak' the critics! I suppose you could thus call the Internet a "Reformed" - as in "Reformation" - technology.
Of course, this also means, I suspect, that there is a lot of crap out there as well - the editor's job is to pull up the weeds and prune the overgrowth. And I imagine that there are an awful lot of poorly tended plots, out there. (Pun intentional).
What will be interesting to see is how the Web influences the stylistic conventions of this new literature. Line justification, capitalization of the first letter of a sentence, paragraph indentations - the printing press created a need for these to be standardized. The medium shapes the message. And the Internet will do the same to Web literature, I am sure.
For example, I just previewed this entry, and LiveJournal removed all the indentations that I put at each paragraph. Back in high school, when I was learning to type on a typewriter, I was very carefully taught to indent each graf five spaces. But I don't think I've ever seen an email that is indented - the most common style seems to be a line of empty space between each graf.
Vocabulary, too. Above, I sought for a word to describe the interaction between author and audience on the Internet, and the word that sprang to mind was "link". Not "conversation" or "dialogue" or "contact"; "link", which has gained a new meaning and a new connotation in the Internet age.
This is interesting stuff.