Online writing is supplementary, complementary, another part of the whole, something that's only as important as one's investment in it.
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 KleinGenre categorization is a capitalist (rather than artistic) thing, a symptom of marketing and major-chain bookshelf placement.
Lee KleinThe 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 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 Klein