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.
Lee KleinThere'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.
Lee KleinConsidering 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."
Lee KleinArtists 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.
Lee Klein