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Rather than simply duplicating what exists in printed form or complementing existing collections, the digital presentation of literary production now often supplants traditional print media. Many literary productions are never even published in book form, and many libraries have holdings predominantly in digital formats. Aside from accessibility issues and the myriad of technological concerns that surround the shift from print media to electronic (delivered through the Internet), there are profound implications for users throughout the world, as the Internet and new infrastructures allow globalization and cultural diversity to take many different forms.

This article closely examines underlying philosophical and cognitive issues now emerging, looking primarily at literature’s role in how it is that we know ourselves and our world, and how literature on the Internet impacts both how we know and what we consider knowledge. It also requires a close examination of both the form and the function of literature on the Internet, especially that literature which consists of works from small or developing nations, whose language(s) are not well-known, and where the literary output consists of works previously inaccessible to the majority of English-speaking readers.

The implications of literature on the Internet are of key importance to all users of the Internet. However it is of particular importance to those users who form a part of communities living on the verge of exclusion in the global e-community, or a “Global e-Village,” to modify Marshall McLuhan’s now famous term. Exclusion is of critical importance because to become excluded means to be invisible in the new medium. As was the case when television first came on the scene, the new medium has the ability to create what people perceive as being even more real and more truthful than the reality that they live, breath, and perceive with their own senses. The vicarious world (or, in Internet terms, the “virtual world”) became the more credible world. In an essay which describes the revolutionary way in which the French poet Stephane Mallarmé understood the relationship between the printed word, readers, perception, and reality, McLuhan explained that Mallarmé viewed the role of the artist in a new, constructivist way. According to McLuhan, Mallarmé realized that “now was the time for the artist to intervene in a new way and to manipulate the new media of communication by a precise and delicate adjustment of the relations of words, things, and events. His task had become not self-expression but the release of the life in things. Un Coup de Dés [by Mallarmé] illustrates the road [Mallarmé] took in the exploitation of all things as gestures of the mind, magically adjusted to the secret powers of being” (McLuhan 64).

The medium creates reality, asserts McLuhan. For Mallarmé, the medium was the book, and Mallarmé expresses for the first time the notion that not only does a book create a world, but that the world cries out to be represented in a book. According to McLuhan, what Mallarmé saw was “a matter of metaphysical fact, that all existence cries out to be raised to the level of scientific or poetic intelligibility. In this sense ‘the book’ confers on things and person another mode of existence which helps to perfect them” (McLuhan 67). Clearly, the same argument could be applied the Internet, and one could even paraphrase McLuhan to say that “the website” confers on things an persons an other mode of existence which helps to perfect them. The website creates a “virtual world,” but the real world also cries out to be represented in the virtual world, precisely because in the representation achievable in cyberspace (Internet) is so much more malleable and, in essence, perfectible.

The desire to create a perfectible world is a utopian one, and it is a concept which is easily grasped by the most “newbie” of Internet users. However, the desire to create, or at least envision, one’s own notion of a perfect world on the Internet is a desire thwarted by the realities of the schism which exists between so-called first-world and third-world conditions. While access to the Internet means that building or envisioning the perfect world is possible, a lack of access means exclusion. Communities potentially excluded in the global eVillage are those lacking one or more of the following: technical ability to build and upload sites; infrastructure necessary for access or hosting a website; insufficient speed or bandwidth to access or host websites, or even basic services such as electricity or telecommunications services. There also exist potential barriers because English (or at least a form of English) exerts hegemonic influence in the Internet and those without English skills will not be able to communicate their message effectively. The ethics of exclusion and inclusion are complicated by the Internet where access and visibility are not determined merely by an entity’s possessions of the means of production (computers, infrastructure, software) but also in one’s ability to emulate and/or incorporate the techniques and tactics of large multinational corporations who dominate the Internet, and which dictate the aesthetic and technical means by which websites are created. There are also additional complications because much of the web is managed by those who possess the means to host websites and to disseminate “useful” information. Such entities include the large portals such as Yahoo and Lycos, as well as integrated news/media/Internet information disseminators such as ABCNEWS/Disney and CNN.

Exclusion, marginalization, and invisibility are possible even if one does manage to stake a place out on the Internet and build a website. As Edward S. Herman and Robert W. McChesney suggest in their analysis of the manner in which corporate capitalistic objectives are pervading the new medium of the Internet, and thus shaping the motives for which individuals are provided access, and their perceptions, “what seems probable, then, is a ‘web within the web,’ where the media firm websites and some other fortunate content producers are assured recognition and audiences, and less well-endowed websites drift off to the margins,” (Herman and McChesney 124). For literature of non-dominant cultures, what seems to be a simple matter of “self-fashioning” or of scripting oneself into being by building a website becomes complicated when one realizes that they must compete with well-funded media giants whose objectives can be capitalistic, or consumer-driven.

Further, “the first-tier global media giants are using all methods [of new technology] to see themselves among those privileged Internet content providers who are being ‘pushed’ into people’s attention and not getting left in obscurity” (Herman and McChesney 125). Thus, it becomes clear that for material of very little commercial interest (the literature of a non-dominant culture, particularly if it is still in the original language), it is necessary to ally oneself with one of the giants, either by piggy-backing on their services (using their websites, allowing their advertisements to appear on the website), or by allowing one’s product - literature / culture - to be co-opted, its “mission” subsumed by the larger mission of capitalism. This can occur in stages. First, it is necessary to build a site in the same language as the websites of the media giants (English). Second, it is necessary to fashion the marginalized literature in such a way as to be attractive enough for inclusion as “content” for a large corporate site such as Britannica.com or about.com which provides (sells) information about other countries and/or cultures. The content functions as an enticement to the reader; just enough bait to encourage the web-surfer to click on the site and then, possibly, to follow a link to a purely commercial site. These are the activities that inform the “global village,” and the awareness of the motions and motives of the villagers is crucial because it is a question not only of navigation and traffic to throughout the village (to the websites), but of the dynamics of potential extinction.

McLuhan’s “global village” is created by the new media, the Internet. What McLuhan said in 1969 applies in 2001: “the new media are not ways of relating us to the old ‘real’ world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will” (McLuhan 272). So, if a website purports to include literature, then it has become the “real world” of literature, and it certainly would reshape what remains of the ‘old literature’ (old world) at will. Thus, a website containing literature possesses a powerful manner in which to assert itself as the real world, and to actually reshape (or cause to be reassessed) what was previously considered literature.

This village is electronically situated, and it consists of people who may or may not know each other’s geographical location. However, they come together in various locations on the Internet - chat rooms, discussion boards, web logs, e-mail addresses, web sites — and they know each other by their own “invented” names. Thus not only is geographical location indeterminate, but also identity is also indeterminate (or invented). The old identity-tags such as nationality, race, ethnicity, or family are all being recast along new affiliations, which constitutes the sort of “new tribalism” emerging in the wake of the breakdown of old identities, such as the former Soviet Union.

Part of the argument contained here suggests that literature and culture cannot be separated and that the “new media” (whether it be a book, television, the Internet, or some other method for the propagation and dissemination of literature), in representing literature, simultaneously represents or becomes a dynamic metonomy for culture. Thus the “new media” becomes, on at least one level, the ontological equivalent of the bodies of literature and culture it purports to be promulgating as a simple vehicle. Instead of being its vehicle, the “new media” - in this case, the Internet - is inextricably bound up in the culture and literature, to the point that it becomes a new entity altogether. Michael Menser and Stanley Aronowitz explained the phenomenon in the following way: “Technology is not simply to be deployed” [in the promulgation of literature, the arts, etc.] but instead, “technologies, nature, and culture are all intertwined, not just in practice but ontologically,” (Menser and Aroniwitz 21). It is necessary to look at literature and culture on the Internet as something entirely new - not simply a more convenient way to access books or learn, encyclopedically, about a place or a people.

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