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