Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature

[David Morris]

http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2009/05/eighteen-challenges-in-contemporary-literature


1. Literature is language-based and national; contemporary society is
globalizing and polyglot.

2. Vernacular means of everyday communication — cellphones, social networks,
streaming video — are moving into areas where printed text cannot follow.

3. Intellectual property systems failing.

4. Means of book promotion, distribution and retail destabilized.

5. Ink-on-paper manufacturing is an outmoded, toxic industry with steeply
rising costs.

6. Core demographic for printed media is aging faster than the general
population. Failure of print and newspapers is disenfranching young
apprentice writers.

7. Media conglomerates have poor business model; economically rationalized
“culture industry” is actively hostile to vital aspects of humane culture.

8. Long tail balkanizes audiences, disrupts means of canon-building and
fragments literary reputation.

9. Digital public-domain transforms traditional literary heritage into a
huge, cost-free, portable, searchable database, radically transforming the
reader’s relationship to belle-lettres.

10. Contemporary literature not confronting issues of general urgency;
dominant best-sellers are in former niche genres such as fantasies, romances
and teen books.

11. Barriers to publication entry have crashed, enabling huge torrent of
subliterary and/or nonliterary textual expression.

12. Algorithms and social media replacing work of editors and publishing
houses; network socially-generated texts replacing individually-authored
texts.

13. “Convergence culture” obliterating former distinctions between media;
books becoming one minor aspect of huge tweet/ blog/ comics/ games /
soundtrack/ television / cinema / ancillary-merchandise pro-fan franchises.

14. Unstable computer and cellphone interfaces becoming world’s primary
means of cultural access. Compositor systems remake media in their own
hybrid creole image.

15. Scholars steeped within the disciplines becoming cross-linked
jack-of-all-trades virtual intelligentsia.

16. Academic education system suffering severe bubble-inflation.

17. Polarizing civil cold war is harmful to intellectual honesty.

18. The Gothic fate of poor slain Poetry is the specter at this dwindling
feast.
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