Digital Literature discusses how the internet and digital technologies have revolutionized communication and the publishing world. Writers must now produce content for online distribution, incorporating multimedia elements like graphics, video and code. The barriers to publishing have been removed, allowing anyone to become an author by creating a website. While this democratization of media has opened opportunities, it has also led to issues like piracy, copyright infringement and legal challenges around regulating content online. The internet continues to change how society shares information and tells stories.

1. Digital Literature
By Nora Boyle
As the Earth rotates at 1,000 miles per second and orbits the sun at 25, 000 miles
per hour, news travels fast on our planet. Journalism isn’t just yellow anymore –it
creates a Doppler effect. Writers become a function of this hyperspace. “...Headline
news, around the world every thirty minutes...” One must catch this lightning in a
bottle and write in hypertext (HTML), produce graphics, translate into several
languages and ‘program’ for this speed-of-light information age.
Or, if you like Einstein’s theory of relativity, time does not move in a straight line,
sometimes moving backwards and forwards, and stopping dead in its tracks. Hence,
the occupational hazards of documenting ‘reality.’ With the advent of the Digerati,
or the ‘online’ cyber writers, everyone is publishing.
The bluestocking ladies of yesteryear are today’s cybergrrls, and a ‘man of letters’
transmutes into ‘webmaster’ or ‘online editor’ The printing press, now digitized,
allows anyone authorship via website, e-zine, and of course email. The democracy
of web publishing is available to anyone willing to invest in a computer. The mouse is
mightier than the sword.
The post modern writer no longer writes, he transmits. The ‘Digital Divide,’ the
remaining populace without computers greatly troubles the lawmakers, but it seems
all are willing to make the jump. People without computers, fear they are left out,
and indeed they are. They sense the transponders, antennas, satellite links, and
frequencies of the electrical grid that is our society. Those on the side of the
computer illiterate in the Digital Divide will surely lack the intellectual capital of the
other.
All have heard the hue and cry: “...Not since 1450 when Guttenberg invented
movable type, has there been such a revolution in communication.... yadda, yadda,
yadda. “To Will Shakespeare, a mere writing table and quill pen sufficed. Today’s
Shakespeare would be online with a stylus and PDA (personal digital assistant) and
of course, have a producer, an agent, and an entertainment lawyer. Will needs
DSL, a Digital Subscriber Line, a high-bandwidth technology, accessing the Internet
126 times faster than standard telephone modems.
He could email his producer the rewrites on his latest play, which is produced on
DVD. Enthralled by this new age, he devises a play called “To Be or Not to Be
Digital” And, Will Shakespeare would be prescient enough to see what USA Today
reported: Around 2030 or so, the computer may very well be filled with liquid instead
of transistors and chips.
It would be a ‘quantum’ computer, employing quantum mechanics, and possibly
allow for teleportation (“Beam me up, Scotty”). Further, this quantum computer
would be a ‘data rocket’ using atoms to calculate instead of computer chips. Since
an atom can be up and down at once, it's not just equal to one ‘bit,’ as in a
traditional computer. Scientists call it a ‘Qubit. ‘And, if you are still muddling
through the Middle English of computing, then read Nicholas Negroponte’s “Being
Digital,” to catch up.

2. So, what’s a space age Shakespeare to do? Write content, of course, burn CDs,
distribute via a website, with streaming video, and keep
an eye on merchandising for E-Commerce. Then, of
course, there’s the piracy on the Internet’s high seas.
Shakespeare would have encoded digital signatures on
all his works before electronically transferring any file.
He would also have a technology attorney to protect his
rights, and say, “first thing, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
As cyber stalking, slander, and smut proliferate, and
lawmakers attempt to tax the Internet, new and mutant
forms of attorneys will spawn. The Digital Millennium
Copyright Act (DMCA) currently on the table will include
Meta keywords and domain names. The legal
ramifications are many. Will Shakespeare’s publishers
and agents police the Internet to protect their cash cow,
and file suit accordingly. He had to form his own
company, KingsMen.com and pay dearly for Shakespeare.com, and thus writes about
the subversive cyber pirates who steal strange new commodities, selling them on
EBay Underground, the black market auction site.
Illicit copies of the script, “13th Night”, chronicling a cyber pirate queen, appeared
everywhere on the net, and bootlegged copies of the video and music were
downloaded. These cyber pirates wield not swords, but mouse, keyboard, and
laptop, laments Shakespeare.
If you have not yet paid for ‘your name.com,’ you might suffer the legal wrangles of
a Madonna whom after several years and many thousands of dollars finally recouped
her name from a guy who used it to direct traffic to a porn site. The push by the
software and music recording industries, which say the web makes it easier to steal
and redistribute their intellectual property, a struggling innovative software company
like Napster or MP3 becomes a snake pit of attorneys, all because of the democratic
freedom of E-commerce and free E-nterprise.
Statistics show most E-mericans watch TV eight hours per day, and the rest of the
time they are at the computer. There is very little off-line writing or reading
anymore. A small minority still actually ‘read.’ There’s a big surge in the novel as
CD-ROM, or E-book, narrated by audio, including graphics, video streaming and
virtual reality interaction. But, with readership down, newspaper and magazine
circulation dwindle. ‘Screening’ is way up.
The Internet looks and feels more like TV everyday. The national audience watches
TV and mutters to themselves, “...I could write this @#$#. “ But of course, the
unions have such a stranglehold on that medium. The Internet unions will likewise
proliferate, eliminating the mass culture printing press; it was in its golden age. But
for now, the Internet, aside from digital signatures, and self-destructing bugs in
computer programs, is still a free-for-all. It’s a brave new world stage, and we are
mere actors upon it. Only it is a virtual reality, and, we, mere ghostly ‘cookies.’
@ Perish Publishing