The Context of Electronic Literature: Where Do These Things Belong?
Electronic literature is not yet canonical. At this present point, there are so many different kinds of authors and artists working on this project in the process of becoming, arriving at the work of creating electronic literature from so many different disciplinary perspectives, that each of us observes our own antecedents, each of us has our own points of reference, each of us pays credence to our own myths of origin. So forgive me if I start with the recent past and linger in the present. My own myth of the origin of electronic literature is rooted in the innovative literary traditions of the 20th Century. Please realize that my narrative is just that, and not a totalizing meta-narrative to which all or even many in the field of electronic literature adhere. Electronic literature is not taking place in any one distinct part of the culture, but is springing from the side of many different disciplines.

While I often argue that literary studies may be the best place in which to locate electronic literature, because it offers a sophisticated set of critical practices that place works within the cultural context in which they are produced, at this point you’re more likely to find an e-lit practitioner in a design, art, communications or film program than you are in a literature or creative writing program. For all its cutting-edge theory, and the generally left-leaning politics of its constituency, most contemporary English and Literature departments are fundamentally conservative, more likely to recognize and acknowledge innovations that occurred fifty, one hundred, three hundred or five hundred years ago than those taking place today. Creative writing, which is now isolated from Literature proper in most universities, for reasons I don’t completely understand, is surprisingly even less welcoming to literature developed for any medium other than print. While the workshop method that has been institutionalized in creative writing programs over the last forty years has much to offer those of us interested in developing production environments for the creation of new works of electronic literature, most creative writing faculty treat the notion of work written and developed for the computer, rather than the printed page, as a kind of affront or attack on print culture, and want nothing to do with it. I anticipate that this hostility will dissipate over time, as more complex and innovative narrative-driven works of electronic literature take their place in the popular consciousness, and as it becomes clearer to the detractors of e-lit that this work represents not an attack on, but rather a continuation of existing literary traditions. Nonetheless, Katherine Hayles’ remark at this conference — that in the near future, literature departments will need to decide whether they truly are literature departments or exclusively print literature departments — holds true for creative writing programs as well.

After the Bubble
It is our privilege to live in interesting times. I think the period that we’ve just survived: the turn of the Millennium, a period perhaps roughly bounded by beginnings of the economic Internet boom with the Netscape Initial Price Offering in August 1995 and the national tragedy of September 11, 2001, will be remembered as one of the most bizarre and transformative in our history. The issues brought to the foreground during this time, ranging from terrorism to cloning, from the ability of monopolistic multinational corporations to manipulate and distort the world economy to the effects of a set of ubiquitous new technologies on the way that we communicate, create, and even how we structure our own thoughts, will remain those that we wrestle with well into the future.

Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan’s catchphrase for the prevailing sentiments that drove the stock market during this period, “Irrational Exuberance,” has been burned into collective memory by the swift rise, fall, collapse, and wake of the “Internet economy.” By now the story of this tragicomic catastrophe is so well known as to be cliché. A set of relatively simple but profound improvements in our technological and communications infrastructure resulted in a series of widely-adopted cultural practices including “surfing the net,” “checking email,” and “selling it on eBay.” This cultural transformation occurred with great rapidity, was accompanied by a dizzying storm of hype, and with that excitement, a seemingly endless flow of venture capital. For a moment, Wall Street bought firmly into the notion that attention was a more valuable commodity than cash. For a few years, the economy was measured not by profits, but by “traffic” and “eyeballs.” Speculation was regarded not as a sign of uncertainty, but of a confident business model. Companies that had never turned a profit were able to raise enough capital to buy out major brick-and-mortar concerns. At some point it became obvious to everyone that the future of this boom was untenable; we were living on a bubble and at some point it would pop. But when everything is going up, and Mom and Pop are emptying their savings accounts to invest in the latest B2B portal play, the impulse to let it ride can be very powerful indeed. Much of the Western world did just that, investing in bullshit and dreams until the market for tulips finally dried up and the bottom fell out, taking much of rest of the economy with it.

While the hangover from this party has left some with a wrecked house and dim prospects, I think that many, even those affected negatively by the crash, are thankful that it’s all over now. The real has supplanted the surreal, and the wealth that many felt they never truly deserved has returned to the swamp from which it came. A lesson has been learned, one I think valuable for all of us as we proceed with our experiments. Don’t trust your dream to venture capitalists; they’ll only screw it up.

Thankfully, while the marketing executives and venture capitalists were having their decadent launch parties in the penthouse suites, the writers and artists were at work in garrets of their own. The economics of electronic literature are such that no rational person would or could work on projects of innovative experimental literature, and then distribute them for free on the global network, with a profit motive in mind. Very few people creating web-based hypertext, kinetic poetry, interactive drama, or any of a myriad of other forms of electronic literature are doing so with money on the brain. In fact, the reason that most of the people doing this are doing it is because it’s fun.

Formally trained creative writers in particular have been taught that they should work with a limited set of tools — the tools of language — and with a particular media in mind — the fixed, printed page, in all its monumental permanence. With the profusion of personal computers, with the inclusion of screens and multimedia in everyday textuality, and most importantly with the global network linking all of those screens together, we writers find tools that were once cordoned off to other disciplines are now available to us. Concrete poets can now shape poems that move, biographers can now include the voices of their subjects as audio files, postmodern fiction writers can literalize post-structuralist notions of referentiality in their work through hypertext, the time-based aesthetics of film and performance and modes of interactivity once relegated to gaming are now also in the domain of writers. The possibilities are endless, and increase with each passing year, as new tools become available, and as they (many of them) become successively better designed and more accessible with each version release.

Publishing Without Publishers?
Further, with the growth of the global network, our ideas of what publishing is or could be have begun to change. If by “publishing” we mean only the process of connecting readers with literary work, then the publishing industry is no longer necessary. While writers can’t skip the processes of designing the work as a finished “object,” promoting it to an audience, and distributing it globally, they can instead do it themselves. Many works of electronic literature have reached thousands of readers, and have been received critically around the world, without ever having been “published” in our old, formal sense of the word. Of course, in the absence of the publishing industry, the authors of these works have largely been unable to convert the growth of that readership to a profitable economy. While it is now certainly possible to describe one’s vocation as “electronic writer,” it is still a stretch to describe one’s profession that way. The majority of the transactions that take place between an electronic writer and her readership are transactions of attention, not of cash. The writer offers the work, the reader the willingness to read it. The intercession of a cash transaction between these two steps is very rare indeed.

This lack of an economic infrastructure is both one of the principal challenges for electronic literature, and also one of its principal strengths. The meltdown of the dot com economy has had the effect of homogenizing the commercial Internet, of shaking out not only the bit players, but also those whose business models were not explicitly oriented towards commerce and near-term profitability. Many companies once hailed as the future of Web content — sites such as Suck, Feed, Inside, even the “new economy” flagship, The Industry Standard — have already vanished from the face of the Net. On the other hand, over the last several years, we have seen an explosion of creative activity in electronic literature, this art form that presently exists outside of reified economic structures. Indeed, as the young Web editors, designers, and programmers who once commanded generous salaries and stock options during the dot com boom have found themselves unemployed alongside many others of their generation, the economy of their own attention has changed. Many of them have responded to the collapse of the dot coms not by abandoning the Internet, but instead turning back to it as a forum for creative expression, as a place to create not profit but art. If the new economy of the World Wide Web has vanished, the fact of the Internet remains, and the exuberance with which many of us approach the Internet has not dissipated, temporarily unfettered from the greed of its entrepreneurial companion.

Electronic literature’s current state of detachment from commercial concerns poses challenges for many institutions located in different parts of our culture than Silicon Alley and Silicon Valley. It’s a quandary: information wants to be free, and yet writers want to eat. The purpose of the Electronic Literature Organization, and a handful of other institutions, is in large part to help provide other kinds of support to this field that is developing outside of a for-profit economy.