THE BLOG AND THE XXI CENTURY LITERATURE
Literature is part of an ecology of competing media. Such competition can produce tense and stimulating dialogue, continuing appropriations of the effects produced by other means. The arrival of film, television and the computer did not mean, as some critics have even suggested apocalyptic, the end of the novels, poems. The writers have adapted to living with these means: novelists writing procedures incorporated into the film narrative derivatives, poets experimented with the font of the typewriter, but today, thanks to the Internet and computer technology facilities, the blog has appeared as a new literary genre; a new generation of writers use it as a fundamental part of his narrative project, while seeking to incorporate in their writing procedures learned in daily life with the media and emerging technologies.
When a new medium appears, at first tend to mimic existing otherwise: thus, for example, the silent movies of the early twentieth century had many debts to the theater, it was not until the late twenties for the film find its own language and distance of the theater. Because the medium is still very young, the predominant type of blog posts is that they really are columns of opinion or criticism that would look on the printed pages of a newspaper or magazine. There are those who have something of the diary, the notebook, the micro-stories or epigram. The blog format is new, but the language is still owned by other means and other genre.
The blog that uses multiple interactive possibilities of the Internet is announcing a new genre literature. The literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has tried to leave the dictatorship of the text and incorporate other media, was widely seen in the classic novels of the nineteenth and twentieth graphics accompanying the text (Kafka's famous refusal to be illustrated "Metamorphosis", arguing that the suggestive power of the text was enough for the reader) and more recently, WG Sebald became fashionable photographic images incorporating a fundamental part of the text and not as a mere illustration. These examples are timid when compared with all the possibilities that displays the blog to make the text incorporates images, videos, comments from readers. As the critical Mexican Heriberto Yepez, the blog is also "a work of visual art, which the author may redesign or upgrade with minimal knowledge of HTML or simple copy-paste ... What follows here is the media."
The blog is open to dialogue with the many interactive possibilities of the network, navigate to the reader: a post must contain many links that take us from here to there (articles, news, forums, blogs, videos) . The blog also allows readers to comment on the posts. Some bloggers make this impossible, which is against the nature of the blog: the ability to interact immediately and without filters with readers, to make the turn to post comments in a discussion forum. Some point to the danger that the blog becomes a kind of dictatorship of public opinion, which readers are not the author of determining the final text. That, however, is not new. An author's dialogue with readers has always happened, the blog intensify this dialogue, and makes it more likely that the opinion of a reader comes to the author.
The blog is a starting point for one of the ways of the XXI century literature. On the one hand, allows the appearance and self-publishing writers who do not follow the traditional mechanisms Publication of the publishing world (ironically, some blogs such as "reward" for their quality, end up being published as printed books, but the fact is that the true location of the blog is the network). Furthermore, thanks to computer and network, future stories, novels and poems were written incorporating other media such as the reader's opinion. The new digital reader (the Sony Reader, Kindle) will make this easier and transform not only our way of reading, will also transform the idea we have of the literature. In some years, it is not strange to be reading a novel on a digital readout and find a link to a video on YouTube to an entry in Wikipedia. Nor is rare that readers can send in real time, their comments to the author of a story or poem, and, as a result, the writer decides to change the plot of a story or rhyme a sonnet. The author does not die, but the literature will become more interactive. There is no reason for alarm: the literary establishment has shown extraordinary ingenuity in adapting to the challenges of other media.
(Published in the supplement Babelia of The Country , Saturday March 15, 2008)
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