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.

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.

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

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."

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.

The Web ultimately is a medium used by real offline people, and as such, it'll probably be whatever we are.

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