Let's talk about the future of the written word.

Let's start by assuming, of course, that it has one. We've been jotting down thoughts for millenia. We're not going to quit just because our paper starts glowing. Has the internet changed the way we write? Absolutely. But it hasn't killed the impulse. 

What's different is how we consume the results. The paperboy might not have a future because the paper's not going to be important for very much longer. Where once there was a daily news narrative consistent for all citizens of a certain region, now there's a billion different ways to read up on the world as a whole. Give me any two net-connected people and I'll bet you a million to one they read differently. Sure, both might log on to CNN or HuffPo. Both might be Twitter users. But the details of their daily reading experiences won't be identical. Each wakes up every morning and checks a certain set of websites. Each subscribes only to specific Twitter feeds. The reading experience is entirely customizable, an individualized consumption. 

The appeal of web reading doesn't just lie in the filter. People may choose to frequent certain sites because they're written a certain way or give a certain spin, but there's also a question of the fellow readership. Articles become conversations as comment boxes allow for user discussion. People wake up to read the news and then they have the power to respond to it. 

Our entire reading experience is growing more and more interactive. A news article can be read. It can also be replied to, retweeted, submitted to Tumblr, Digg, Reddit. A blogger can repost the content of an article on his or her personal site. Journalists get real-time feedback on their work. Editors take note of their readership's response. Reading and writing jumble together in a constantly flickering conversation. 

What does this say about literature?

More and more of the world subscribes to the fluid text that is the internet. Artistically intended texts such as fiction and poetry--texts that are meant only to be read, not performed or interacted with--have found their niche on the web, too. Creative journals crop up all the time. It's easier than ever to found your own e-zine, and as such there's a plethora of receptacles for aspiring writers to fire off their work. But the niche is a quiet one, huddled somewhere between traditionally consumed literature (paperbacks and e-books) and the ephemeral masses of the web. 

People read now not just to sit and listen, but to participate. Books are still read, but they offer no opportunity for reader interactivity. Will the book survive in an age when we're constantly engaging with the digital world, an enormous and constantly updated text?

Let's look at the latest "officially" recognized art form: the video game. Whether a game's plot is linear or sprawling, it functions under the premise that the player must enter its world and take control for the narrative to move forward. Whether you're guiding a single pixel or a fully rendered avatar, you become invested in the character. You feel good when your character succeeds and are disappointed when you fail. It's a medium that transforms its audience into a character, making it the most interactive and user-dependent of art forms. You are not there to watch; you are there to act. 

Between gaming and literature, small subgenres appear. On the fiction side of things, you have interactive fiction, or IF, which manifests itself as artistically-inclined text-based adventures. Most of the work of an IF piece is reading, but the reader's typed input determines how the piece progresses. Over on the poetry side, you have Vispo: flickering interactive poems that use visual space as much as language as they change under the reader's touch. 

Several game designers are producing games that could double as Vispo. Several authors are writing texts that could double as games. Where are the edges of this Venn diagram and how do they matter to the future of literature? Who will write the first great hypertext novel? How will we know when it happens? 

The way we read the world is changing. What we expect from a work of art or literature is changing. Given time, we might feel so entitled to insert ourselves into anything we read that a traditional novel would feel unfairly barred to us. Because it's becoming about us, more and more so, or so we'd like to feel. Is the change pervasive enough to alter how we consume literature, too? So far, new media work has remained abstruse enough to stay within academic spheres. Not many people are writing it and very few are reading it. But the platform of a wiki-text, of a user-dependent reading experience--that might just be what we need next in the digital age of reading. 

(photo courtesy Engadget)