Conclusion - What's Next?
We see ways in which electronic media can change literature.
The Blake Archive suggests the first possible step that technology can take, by using literature already in existence and placing it online.
In the other examples, the authors used the new media in the creation of their texts, to different effects, but all in some way to comment upon the possible impact of technology upon literature. Some of the suggestions were strictly about the physical experience of the reader, such as reading a text on a screen instead of on a paper page, while other suggestions are revolutionary new ideas about literature. While the works of William Blake will not change, the ways in which we view them still can.
With each reading of Patchwork Girl, the experience can be different, though the disc, like a book, will not change.
The last two examples, Y0UNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES PRESENTS and Lexia to Perplexia, by their very natures, are not fixed entities. They are written with programs that can be altered and reloaded, so that the reader is always faced with the possibility that something will have changed from his or her last visit to the site. In the world of the Internet, old, fixed notions about literature are changing. Though it will perhaps be quite some time before literature becomes a primarily electronic study—and it may never—the time has certainly come when electronic writing cannot be ignored--not as a replacement, but like any other genre, as a new branch.
As technology moves our society ever forward, in ways we may have never imagined, literature too must follow. In my own educational experience, I have spent far more time bent over books, underlining and taking notes than I have reading assignments from a computer screen, and even when given that option, have often printed the material to read it in the medium with which I am more comfortable As computers and the Internet become larger and larger parts of our lives though, in the future, this experience may change.
Where will the future take literature? Where do we want it to go?
Whether it be hypertext or other multimedia options, technology does not threaten literature as we know it—there will always be printed books, I think—but it does offer many new ways to explore writing, reading, ideas and ourselves.