Is Literature Dying in This Digital Age?

      With the booming development of technology, more progressively people rely on the Internet in their daily lives. In spite of searching useful information, we are just becoming accustomed to browsing innumerable information mindlessly and apathetically. Whether literature is facing damage in this digital age has been a topic of public interest and concern.

Some critics and writers state that literature is confronting an unprecedented crisis, due to the encroachment of digital technology. Chris Hedges claims that the digital age contributes to more people becoming illiterates. Based on research represented in his article “America the Illiterate”, he said “a third of high school graduates, along with 42 percent of college graduates, never read a book after they finish school. Eighty percent of the families in the United States last year did not buy a book(Hedges).”     

According to this situation, First, They declare that the poetic and humanistic spirit are facing a serious landslide at the moment of the collision of the Internet and literature, because now many people cannot even calm down to read a novel for just an hour. In addition, they also claim that the easy accessibility of Internet, the varying educational backgrounds of Internet user and the chaotic circumstance of the society collectively contribute to the disordered levels of works, which further lowers the quality of literature and has a destructive impact on the contemporary literary development. Finally, concerning the circumstance of literature, they argue that the Internet may convert to an ideal place for some people randomly spread rumors towards the public due to its loose and inefficient supervisory mechanism. What’s worse, some writers even want to become successfully overnight through the Internet by posting a large number of dirty information online deliberately.

Admittedly, all the statements above are reasonable, so is literature dying in this digital age? I don’t think it is. From my perspective, we cannot simply judge the influence of digital technology in literature by looking at one aspect. The Internet may be a hotbed of trite articles, but it also can be a cradle for some marvelous masterpieces, especially when literary forms, creative atmosphere and efficiency are taken into account.

       First, compared to the literary forms before, people have created various vivid writing styles to illustrate their opinions now in using advanced technology. Owing to the limitation of technology, there are fewer ways for ancient people to write, and they must comply with the rules of form rigidly. For example, ancient Chinese hade to used knives to letter on bamboo chips in classical Chinese characters to make verses, ditties, odes and songs thousands of years ago. Because it was hard for them to record in that way, they created a form for poetry just using twenty-eight Chinese characters separated in four sentences in a poem, and people cannot even have one more letter in that style. However, today people can write whatever they want by sitting in front of a screen, typing on a small keyboard. For example, blog is a new form of literature that appeared in the past several years. In the article “Why I Blog”, Sullivan said

When blogging evolves as a literary form, it is generating a new and quintessentially postmodern idiom that’s enabling writers to express themselves in ways that have never been seen or understood before. Its truths are provisional, and its ethos collective and messy. Yet the interaction it enables between writer and reader is unprecedented, visceral, and sometimes brutal. And make no mistake: it heralds a golden era for journalism (Sullivan).

         The Internet can also combine animation, sound in the articles, which cannot be accomplished by traditional literature forms. For instance, millions of people have joined Blog, and they post different information to share with their friends every day. Many youths like to write journals or articles on blogs, accompanied with some photos that they take to attract others to read their experiences and write comments. In this digital age, literature has evolved to a hypertext multimedia language, and the combination of animation, sound and words greatly enriches literary expression. This is a revolutionary transmission of literature, because this new pattern immensely increases the expressive force of persuasion, expands the restriction of written words and enriches the means of literature performance.

 Secondly, the advanced technology provides an active writing atmosphere by stimulateing people’s ardour to be writers and creating a series of new languages. As a tremendous open media, the Internet neither sets a limited entrance for educational degree, nor has a rigid criticism for someone’s art talent. It generously embraces different levels of various kinds of writers. And everyone can freely use their words to lyricize and narrate their own stories regardless of politics, region and other external factors. In contemporary society, literature is no longer concerned as works written by some famous journalists and writers, but containing some new artistic forms for people to express their own thoughts and emotions in many different ways. With billions of users browsing webs online, everyone in different levels can find some specific fans that interested in his/her works, which leads to a sense of identity in his/her mind and encourage him/her to continue writing. This identity highly stimulates Internet writers’ literature enthusiasm, triggering a new round boom of literature. Besides, as the cheapest media for people to “publish” their own words and beliefs to for public, Internet also gives literature lovers unprecedented impulses to write more works online, which increases the possibility of becoming a writer in this new age. In this open creative atmosphere, literature not only gets the extraordinary transmission range and velocity, but also breaks the formalist traditional supervision before publishing.

   In addition, the Internet refreshes the contemporary literature by creating some new kinds of languages. In recent few years in China, digital language is becoming more and more popular on the Internet based on its Chinese pronunciation. For example, “5201314” means I love you forever, and “88” implies bye-bye. And through combining punctuation symbols together, people can create many funny faces expressing various kinds of emotional expressions. For instance, by simply putting two arrows and an underline together, we have a face like this “→_→” Because these languages are vigorous, humorous and innovative, the new generation is willing to use them in communication to show their distinct characteristics. New languages have been accepted by the society and become a part of culture in this new age. Literature is the art of language, and language is created in our daily life, not made by linguists. Though the new languages have a huge impact on traditional language, they do inject some fresh ingredients into the contemporary literature.

 Thirdly, the Internet is an unbelievable database shared by people all over the world, and it also provides us a lot of new topics for writing. It is much more convenient for people getting the preference resources though the search engines. In his article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Carr said,

For more than a decade now, I have been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes with the Google.(Carr)

We can type and share down our thoughts after reading blogs, arguing with the authors. Some people who are interested in one specific social issue get together to analyze it. Numerous books are transferred into electronic version saved in the database, and we can read them whenever we want by connecting to the Internet. As readers, we prefer to do this rather than take some heavy books with us. In addition, the e-book is much cheaper than hardcovers. And the updating rate of information on the Internet is much faster than the traditional media. We are more willing to rely on some latest information or research data posted online by experts than go back into a library to find and read a book published several years ago.

  In conclusion, the technology entirely changes the transmission mode of literature, the reading habits of people as well as expression ways of authors. However, it does not have a negative influence on the essence elements of literature such as emotion and conscience. Most people still want to read professional and deep articles just as their ancestors did before, and they have not changed the standards of judging works. In other words, the digital technology does not contribute to the dying of literature nowadays. On the contrary, it brings a new vitality and vigor into the contemporary literary world, greatly enriched the contemporary literary performance means. And referring to its new literary forms, open creative atmosphere and plentiful recourses accessibility today, literature is going through a revolution in this digital age.

Works Cited

Andrew Sullivan. "WHY I BLOG." The Atlantic Monthly 302.4 (2008): 106. Print.

Chris Hedges. America the Illiterate. Nov 10, 2008

    <http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081110_america_the_illiterate/>

Nicholas Carr. Is Google Making Us Stupid?. The Atlantic.com, 2008. Print.