In 1996, The Atlantic Online sent Ralph Lombreglia a “Cyber Lit Quiz.” He passed.
Wen Stephenson started the email exchange (something perhaps novel at the time) with this question: “Do you sense that there’s a crisis in our literary culture? And if so, or if there’s just the perception of a crisis, how much of it has to do with new digital, interactive media? Have the Web and other digital media become scapegoats?”
It’s easy enough to peel away the layers of history here. The term “Web 2.0” shows up in 2004, when Tim O’Reilly organized the “Web 2.0 Conference.” The new name didn’t imply a change in the structure of the Web, rather it marked the moment when the Web had grown up. Web applications were born and allowed for diverse new methods of interactivity, including information sharing, interoperability, design, and collaboration. The hosted services, web applications, social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, and blogs that grew in this new space have effectively changed the way we communicate forever. Although the Web may not have changed, the uses we discovered for it had suddenly, and irrevocably changed us. The epistemological shift that occurred as a result has affected every aspect of our society and how we integrate ourselves into it because the Web became another interactive space, something closer to our “real” lives, and, therefore, infinitely richer than any other medium to come before it. This interactivity produces for us a second life, another space to explore what it means to be human, even if the circumstances of that life are conceptually and practically new.
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New Media Fiction 