Been thinking lately about how literature and new media fit together. It started when I published a story in the Oregon Literary Review, in the last issue before the journal changes to a video-file-only format. Beginning in 2010, OLR will only feature writers reading or performing their work.
Then as I did research for my job, I stumbled across poemsoutloud.org which features audio files of authors reading their work. That site links to a couple of similarly formatted sites, some that I'd heard of, some that were new to me.
I like the idea of literature playing a different role, of updating itself to fit the way that we read and consume ideas today.
I also like the idea (obviously) of blogging. Blogging feels like a type of power, like you're bypassing the gatekeepers to say whatever you want.
Salon has an interesting article about blogs and how they are changing the media game. In it, Scott Rosenberg writes that traditional media institutions don't hold the blogosphere in high regard. Media mogul Barry Diller implies that any talentless person can write a blog, but Rosenberg says that Diller and others are missing the point:
"Their view values each bit of expression based on marketplace worth and potential breadth of appeal, but ignores any worth the expression may have to the person who made it. Most narrow-mindedly of all, they assume that yesterday's filtering methods will remain reliable and sufficient tomorrow, no matter how radically the environment changes around them."
In the Salon comments, one writer wondered what our new media means for the novel. After all, blogs are like essays of journalism, but what about longer written forms? I've heard about digital novels and microblogging novels on Twitter, but I've never checked any of this out.
I don't know.
I do feel like the best "novel" that I've "read" in years was watching all five seasons of "The Wire" on Netflix...
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