To me, “The internet is killing literature” argument has the same ring to it as the “Millennials are killing the chain restaurant industry,” argument.
We’ve all heard it, “millennials are no longer buying diamonds,” and “millennials don’t care about paper napkins,” and usually people ignore the fact that maybe millennials are deciding to spend their money on quality things that aren’t made with the labor of people who are basically worked like slaves.
Lately, this same kind of notion that the “newer” is ruining the “older” has attached itself to the internet and literature. For example, Lindsay Saienni wrote an article, “Instagram Poets Are Ruining Everything,” complaining about how Instagram poets like R.M. Drake or Samantha King Holmes are somehow ruining “real” poetry and her own chances of getting attention from her poetry, simply by expressing themselves on social media.
Saienni rants about how she doesn’t understand how she can go “through rigorous poetry workshops,” or spend “hours counting beats for sonnets,” and have her own poetry “rejected from literary magazines,” only for Instagram poets’ “pretentious crap” to get all the attention. I, for one, think this argument is outrageous, and I don’t understand how one author could be so unsupportive of the next. Saienni calls Instagram poetry “pretentious crap” but honestly, the only thing that sounds pretentious to me, is HER. One piece of writing does not negate the worth of another piece of writing. Art is art.
All things considered, I think people need to learn that change is not the enemy. While Millennials may be killing chain restaurants, they are also opening countless locally owned, quality eateries. In the same hand, the internet is not “killing” literature, it’s just changing literature, making it different. Different isn’t bad, and it doesn’t take away from what came before it.
Literature & the Internet 