web two oh twiddles, lit crit yearns

Qualis artifex pereo. Short, sweet, and to the point:

With the rise of the web, writing has met its photography. By that I mean, writing has encountered a situation similar to what happened to painting upon the invention of photography, a technology so much better at doing what the art form had been trying to do, that in order to survive, the field had to alter its course radically. If photography was striving for sharp focus, painting was forced to go soft, hence Impressionism. Faced with an unprecedented amount of digital available text, writing needs to redefine itself in order to adapt to the new environment of textual abundance.

[Kenneth Goldsmith Writing Crisis V.1.0; via Ron Silliman’s mini-posting.]