That we live in a ubiquitously connected electronic world is by now such a firm fact of 21st century life that it hardly seems worth noting, no matter how much we worry it may be altering the nature of human experience in ominous ways. Diminished attention spans and a narrowed conception of social relations may indeed be among the consequences of the ascendancy of the internet, but there is currently not much reason to believe its reach will soon be curtailed by our concerns about these matters. The story of how the world we inhabit increasingly became a cyberspace is certainly incomplete, although that space is likely to become more all-encompassing, as the serviceability of online technology continues to be extended and refined.
A recent book focusing on the story so far, Extremely Online (Taylor Lorenz), contends that the internet has taken its present form not so much through the efforts of those developing the technology but the collective efforts of users who through their resourceful adaptations of the possibilities offered by the internet enhanced its character and shaped its ethos. Although the book emphasizes the evolving economic dominance of the internet and the cultural impact of "influencers," it maintains that "the web" served as a means of expression not previously so widely available and empowered enterprising individuals to create novel forms of communication and association.
If the influencer addressing popular subjects of widespread interest could ultimately accumulate a very large audience, smaller communities of interest might also begin to appear through this new mode of connection. Thus arose what came to be called the "blogosphere," that domain of cyberspace occupied by versions of the weblog, the form of online communication that became the first manifestation of the web's capacity to produce new channels of discourse that bypassed the officially sanctioned practices to be found in print publications. One of the variants of the blog was the literary weblog, or "litblog," which, as the name suggests, was concerned with books and literary culture, although eventually some litblogs focused even more particularly on various eras of literary history or on specific literary forms.
Litblogs still exist, but many of the blogs that initially brought attention to the phenomenon of litblogging do not, or have been modified into more general literary websites. At first, litblogs were pretty closely tied to the established print media that devoted space to books coverage and other literary news. Blog posts were usually quite brief, often mostly links to print sources, and were largely intended to provide wider access to developments in the literary world. As more readers became aware of the early blogs, and the number of blogs began to proliferate (often launched by these very readers), the comments section of litblogs became more active as well, as the common practice of offering a "blogroll" identifying other blogs and bloggers engaged in what increasingly seemed a common project, served to create an informal community of readers, whose interest in books, and literature more generally, were evidently not being adequately satisfied by the mainstream literary press.
Soon enough, then, just linking to reviews or noting daily literary developments started to seem a limited use of the weblog's potential, and litblogs began to feature more substantial commentary, still mostly informal in tone and relatively modest in length, but attempting to augment the consideration of literary matters rather than simply relating it through links. This happened as more people joined the litblogosphere, from a variety of backgrounds but seeming to share a belief that the blog as a medium presented an opportunity for both a broader and deeper engagement with books and writing than the existing hierarchy of the "mainstream media" could accommodate. Among the new bloggers were academic literary critics testing out the form, some as a forum for amplifying their academic work, but others writing about literature more directly, either as a supplement to academic writing or in some cases an alternative to academic criticism in its then current version.
I myself belonged to this group of converts to the litblog (although I decided to adopt the form relatively early, when only a few of those who would become the most recognized of the early litbloggers had already established their blogs, bloggers such as Maud Newton, Laila Lalami, and Mark Sarvas). My goal in starting The Reading Experience from the beginning was to see if serious literary criticism could be carried out on a blog. As I tried to suggest through the name I chose for the blog, I was attempting neither to use the site as a way of providing a broader context for my work as an academic critic, nor to turn it into an outlet for an academic criticism modified to a new medium. Instead I imagined the weblog and its growing audience as a potential opportunity to bridge differences between the kind of academic criticism I had learned to practice and a more general-interest criticism that attempted to reach a larger, less insular audience but emphasized the analytical as much as the evaluative.
I would not say that my motivation was strictly shared by other bloggers who helped expand the scope of the litblog. My posts on The Reading Experience were likely the product of my own idiosyncratic notion of what a "literary" blog could be, although I did receive enough encouragement from readers and other bloggers about my approach--encouragement that indeed may have been prompted by a perception that what I was doing was something different--that I felt sufficiently motivated to do almost all of my writing on the blog (no more academic articles or lengthy literary essays pitched to whatever publication might seem a promising target). At first I didn't really write many straight-out reviews, as the goal was not to reproduce mainstream book review discourse but to develop a less formalized kind of commentary that still offered more than facile judgments of either praise or disapproval.
Many of the posts I wrote in the early days of the blog were in fact not close readings of individual works at all. They were instead direct reflections on the practice or criticism that, at least in retrospect, were more like lectures than book chat. Indeed, I now cringe somewhat at the rather high-handed manner of some of these posts whenever I re-read them, although perhaps the tone seems high-handed because it is no longer so unusual to find an elevated level of discourse on blogs and websites devoted to literature and literary discussion. Such discourse can take for granted that its audience shares assumptions and expectations, but since I really didn't know what knowledge or interest my readers actually brought to the perusal of my blog, I chose to address them as just the sort who would be receptive to the kind of analysis and appraisal I hoped my blog could provide--curious and intelligent, but otherwise more accustomed to the existing norms of mainstream literary journalism.
I can't exactly say that I had in mind from the beginning to overthrow these "norms" of mainstream critical writing, but gradually this did indeed more or less become an implicit--in some cases explicit--ambition as The Reading Experience became more established. (Given the low traffic this blog presently attracts, I am always rather astonished to look back at the user numbers from its early years--although my blog was not among the very most popular litblogs, from my current perspective those numbers nevertheless seem huge.) And in this I believe I can say I was joined by a significant number of other litbloggers for whom "mainstream" increasingly became a term of abuse. Certainly through distinguishing ourselves from mainstream print publications we were engaged in a fair amount of self-promotion, setting ourselves up as "alternative" sources of information and judgment (even though more often than not the information came from the print sources we otherwise disdained). Yet I do think that as a whole this early group of litbloggers (a snapshot of my blog's blogroll from the time can be found here) did share an enthusiasm for literary works, new and old, that were outside mainstream reading habits and that did not merely reinforce the dominance of the biggest publishers.
This broader orientation was ultimately reflected in the creation of a cross-blog alliance we called (somewhat clumsily) the "Litblog Co-op" (link). This group in its mission statement explicitly declared itself to be "uniting the leading literary blogs for the purpose of drawing attention to the best of contemporary fiction, authors, and presses that are struggling to be noticed in a flooded marketplace." Ultimately the co-op's activities were largely restricted to making a quarterly selection of one new book to be highlighted through a prize-like announcement on the group's collective website and accompanied by individual posts related to the selection, written by various members. (These weren't always laudatory. I myself registered a couple of dissenting views regarding the selected books.) The endeavor was short-lived: the first "Read This!" selection was made in 2005, and by 2007 the group disbanded.
In retrospect, this project was clearly enough an attempt by the "leading" litbloggers both to reinforce their status as a vanguard of sorts in the rise to prominence of the literary weblog and to certify the litblog as the successor to print-dominated literary journalism. The first ambition was perhaps temporarily fulfilled, but even during the two brief years of the group's existence, new literary blogs continued to emerge, and while to an extent the LBC (as we referred to it) tried to accommodate this reality by periodically adding new members, that this endeavor finally could only reinscribe the hierarchical order against which the literary blogosphere was supposedly standing seems perfectly obvious now, and this would have become a debilitating contradiction even if the Litblog Co-op had continued a while longer. The second aspiration likewise could be dismissed as mostly presumption and hubris, except that the underlying supposition was in fact ultimately confirmed: the litblog itself did not become the successor to print journalism as the primary source of literary discussion, but the blog did prove to be the herald of a large-scale migration of serious literary discourse from existing print publications to various kinds of literary-focused sites online.
Intellectual discussion of numerous other subjects also appeared with more regularity both on blogs and in other web-based forms, but the resistance to the idea that substantive literary journalism and criticism (aside from informal "book chat") might be carried out on the internet was particularly strong and persisted longer--except when such resistance just disappeared. Many if not most of the literary blogs associated with the LBC began posting less often and eventually stopped altogether. I myself put The Reading Experience on an extended hiatus, and when I decided to bring it back, the audience for a blog such as mine had clearly diminished. But in the meantime other websites centered on literature and literary criticism had appeared and were replicating the kind of close monitoring of developments in the book world that litblogs had supplied. They were also more like conventional publications with a "staff" of writers and editors rather than the personal journals of the proverbial bloggers in their pajamas. And not only were the legacy print publications no longer condescending to online literary conversations but soon enough were themselves joining in with their own blog-like venues, such as the New Yorker's "Page-Turner."
New web publications offering thoughtful longer-form literary criticism--mostly in the form of book reviews but not necessarily confined to reviews--also began to appear with some frequency, and when I began to less frequently update The Reading Experience, I turned to these publications to pursue my own continuing interest in cultivating a kind of criticism that had intellectual credibility without simply mirroring the periodical book review or the academic essay. Luckily there were a number of web-based publications that allowed me to do this, such periodicals as The Quarterly Conversation, Open Letters Monthly, 3:A.M. Magazine, and Full Stop. Writing for these outlets was, on the one hand, fully comparable to writing for traditional print publications--being assigned a review or making a pitch for one, working with an editor--but on the other felt more like enhanced blogging. The books included for review were much more varied than in mainstream book review sections, including more books in translation and from smaller presses, and the editors demonstrated a greater interest in unconventional, adventurous works. Reviews were less formulaic, with a greater tolerance for longer and more digressive analysis, while some reviewers made their reviews less formal and more personal as compared to typical newspaper and magazine reviews. Still, these web publications maintained a relationship to the reading audience that was closer to the one-way communication enforced by traditional print newspapers and periodicals. They brought in a wider range of contributors, but there were few of the interchanges between wrier and reader that on occasion enhanced the discourse on literary blogs.
Like literary blogs themselves, these initial online book reviews went through a process of waxing and waning. Some of them are now discontinued or curtailed in their scope. What seems like a fresh opportunity to develop more a capacious kind of literary criticism generates some enthusiasm, but that enthusiasm can't compete with the greater resources devoted to subsequent sites that appropriate the approach taken by those who established the practice, while redirecting the coverage and focus of interest to a broader consideration of literary culture (and culture in general) and ultimately a more mainstream audience. And gradually the new literary websites come to seem in their organization and outlook more like the sort of conventional literary organs we bloggers wanted to challenge.
While some of us had entertained fantasies of some such consortium of litblogs as the LBC replacing conventional literary organs, the kind of web publication that evolved during the 2010s actually did replace them. There is no doubt that the New York Times Book Review and the Times Literary Supplement continue to be the most prestigious and influential standalone book reviews, but they are indeed standing pretty much alone among newspaper book reviews. The book review sections of most newspapers have either been eliminated or severely cut back, and the New York Review of Books is about the only remaining independent print publication in the United States exclusively offering book reviews. Magazines such as The Nation and The New Republic still offer book reviews, but I daresay most readers access these publications online and experience them as essentially another online site. The extent to which this erosion is due to the increased availability of online book review websites is debatable, but there is no doubt that competition from the internet has contributed to it. Coverage of books, and the arts more generally, seems to has substantially been left to web-based publications.
Certainly it is not the case that literary commentary has migrated to the web simply because it has been abandoned by financially straitened print publications. The quality of the commentary is indeed high in such places as the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Point, and Public Books, arguably as high or higher than it ever was in all but the most distinguished print magazines. In these publications it can perhaps be said that the potential for the online medium not merely to reproduce the literary discourse of traditional print criticism but to augment or supersede it is realized. But in the process, they have also recreated the rhetorical situation in which pre-web criticism was produced, with status and authority invested in the editorial distinction presumed by the publication itself, which in turn confers it on the critics and reviewers featured. Even when the subjects covered in these journals are associated with mass entertainment rather than works of high seriousness, a kind of highbrow importance is still attached to the analysis provided, with little or no audience participation encouraged.
Arguably there is a need for criticism and commentary that offers an authoritative perspective, supported by the critic's manifest knowledge and critical acumen. Any perceived distance between critic and readers or even critic and other critics is less important than the model of serious reading provided by the most committed critics. The sorts of critical sites I have mentioned are more likely to feature critics whose primary calling is as a critic rather than a fiction writer, and the underlying motivation for much of what is published in them more often seems to be first of all as an exercise in critical understanding, not the provision of consumer information, as continues to be the case with the majority of newspaper book reviews. Neither do they focus so relentlessly on just the currently "newsworthy" releases, and what coverage there is of foreign titles in American book review spaces is largely found in online publications. In all of these ways, a good deal of the literary criticism published online redeems the proposition inherent to the early litblogosphere that the internet could serve as a medium for substantive engagement with literature.
Yet even if consequential literary criticism can now abundantly enough be found online, the evolution of online literary discourse from the blog to highbrow online journals has taken us from the possibility that a critical space might be created for a different kind of criticism, neither "general" (although accessible) nor "academic (although serious-minded), to a reoccupation of such space by critical writing that is intellectually credible but almost as insular and remote as the mainstream establishment practices against which the literary blogosphere reacted in the first place. In their commission of reviews and choice of critics, they are just as likely to to apply the criteria conventionally used to produce "interesting" pieces--interesting in subject or theme but not necessarily focused on pure literary interest--and to "match" the book under review to reviewer with the right credentials or a currently high profile. While book reviews and literary commentary certainly pay very little, attitudes have shifted back to the assumption that "real" reviews are those that are paid, with the accompanying inference that such reviews are credible because they are published through a reputable editorial process. In short, the literary weblog may have prepared the way for a critical writing about literature online that not just rivalled but eventually exceeded both in quantity and depth what had been available in general-interest print publications, but in the end it has reconstructed the apparatus that makes literary commentary an elite practice.
This was perhaps inevitable. Just as the internet itself was consolidated into the American media system (and into the capitalist system as a whole), the literary version of this system seized on the developing online modes of communication and was able to dominate them. Resistance to this takeover was not very strenuous, as writers, as they always will, sought readers, as well as recognition from perceived authorities, and critics sought to be recognized as such authorities. Looking back at it, it seems pretty clear that my early blogging colleagues not so secretly hoped that the increasing attention paid to them as bloggers would ultimately lead them to opportunities in the establishment media we were supposedly challenging (and I don't exempt myself from having such thoughts). A significant number of them succeeded in their ambitions, and some of them now occupy prominent places in that since-transformed establishment. I am perfectly happy with their success, but I am undecided whether finally I consider ti a sign of the larger triumph of literary blogging or a token of its surrender.
Although perhaps the real surrender of blogging occurred with the rise of social media, but most especially Twitter. It is almost certainly true that Twitter appropriated from the early blogs the short digest form of post--usually brief notices of literary news, often joined to some pointed commentary, or sometimes just a brief outburst of opinion. This sort of proto-microblogging was, in fact, popularly associated with blogging at first, serving a function similar to Twitter but without the centralized address. The one-stop convenience of Twitter eventually rendered digest posts superfluous, and when Twitter and other social media sites began developing their own books-based communities, there was no longer a reason to visit litblogs that primarily featured these Twitter-like posts. Many of those blogs simply ceased activity, and the literary blog itself more or less faded from prominence as a phenomenon of literary culture.
Individual blogs by writers focused on literature of course persist, but few of them maintain any kind of steadily high traffic, although this is not really the ambition behind most of them. Unlike the early blogs, they don't really seek to challenge existing literary discourse but to provide an alternative for readers not keenly attuned to it. Some are more narrowly specialized--Neglected Books, The Untranslated--while others allow their authors to register their ongoing responses to the books they read (fulfilling one of the paradigmatic functions of litblogging). Those seeking a larger audience have instead turned to Substack, which (along with other, similar newsletter services) takes the writer's efforts directly to the reader via email rather than waiting for readers to arrive--a blog on wheels, perhaps. To some extent the popularity of Substack as a way of distributing blog-like writing suggests that the impulse originally satisfied through the development of the weblog still motivates writers and would-be writers to take advantage of internet technology to circumvent traditional modes of publication. On the other hand, both phenomena might just be evidence of the way in which the technology creates the need for its use. Surely the growth of Substack has encouraged the proliferation of newsletters covering less-than-urgent topics, and it is likely we will reach a point of diminishing returns for the paid newsletter, as readers reach their limit in spending on subscriptions.
At the least, however, the technology did make available an opportunity to create an "in-between" kind of literary discourse (in between a purely personal reading journal and officially sanctioned literary criticism) open to the unmediated discussion of books and writing, separate from the constraints imposed by established literary journalism as well as academic criticism. (And when literary journalists and academic critics did come to participate in the blogosphere, it was usually according to the protocols attached to blogging, not the other way around, as at, for example, an "academic" blog called The Valve, to which I was a contributor for several years.) But as audiences grew and the lure of profit beckoned (although we now know that this prospect has turned out to be an illusion), the technology changed ("improved"), and the conditions on the ground, so to speak, also inevitably changed, The blog would turn out to be only the initial step in transferring American literary culture online; the simple tools of blogging alone would prove inadequate to such an epochal task.
If literary blogging helped lead us to the much-expanded online network that now serves as the locus of establishment literary activity, this process has unfortunately left no place for blogging. Even with the current unsettled circumstances in both internet publishing and social media (publishers keep going out of business, social media keeps fragmenting), I do not expect that litblogging as we knew it at the beginning will make any kind of significant comeback. Which is not to say that blogging will not survive, just that it won't again have the same king of salience to the direction literary culture takes as it briefly did in the nascent days of the blogosphere. Bloggers will have to be satisfied with a medium that offers limited reach but allows them maximum freedom and infinite space to say what they have to say at whatever length, and perhaps find an audience who wants to hear it. This may be the most invaluable promise the blog made to writers in the first place.