Digitizing everything?

An important aspect of contemporary digital cultures and network societies is the transfer of our “cultural archive” to digital, online formats and to the language of new media (Zvereva 2012: 10). For literature, new digital, networked technology and computer-mediated communication have opened up not only various kinds of digital literature, or “internet literature” (cf. Chapters 10 and 11 by Schmidt and Leibov, in this volume), but also digitized literature, new ways of disseminating texts initially composed for pre-digital formats such as the physical book. ¹ Since the internet became a public domain in the first half of the 1990s, it has made an overwhelming number of books and manuscripts accessible as electronic texts, or as “electronic representations of print literature” (Shillingsburg 2006: 40). These processes have fostered engaged discussions as to whether digitization will mean the “end of the book” (Biagini and Carnino 2009) or not (Carrière and Eco 2011). Whatever the outcome, text dissemination in new media, just like all significant media innovations in the past, will certainly have important implications for the perception of the archival content itself (McLuhan 1964; Carr 2010). Increasingly taking place online, contemporary cultural consumption is gradually being reshaped by the digital formats in which the cultural artifacts are disseminated.