The Internet is perfect for delivering large blocks of text to people throughout the world for free. That's a plus. The downside is the ADD, the Internet-addled Attention Deficit Disorder.

There's a ton of good art and music and writing out there offline among a ton of trash, and the same goes with what's online.

Online writing is supplementary, complementary, another part of the whole, something that's only as important as one's investment in it.

I really wouldn't call a lot of what's online "literature" since that word, to me, refers to a sub-genre of writing that belongs to the heavy-hitters, the canonical writers, Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Dostoevsky, Kafka, and even Toni Morrison, George Saunders, Thomas Bernhard, Sebald, Borges, DFW, e.g.

I'm an only child and an American and am wholly in favor of uniqueness of voice in everything, especially music and writing.

Considering that "literary fiction" is a sub-genre that's not quite the same as "literature," either, it follows that the short, semi-humorous bits posted online for all to see are something absolutely other, uniquely themselves compared to canonical short stories, for example, and so it'd probably be best to call it something other than "online lit" since I honestly think very little of it can compare to so-called "literature."

Artists used to argue about art for art's sake versus social realism etc, and now it's like the most dominate argument is related to "art for the market's sake." It's a necessity, somewhat, for some people.