WILL THE INTERNET GIVE THE DEATH BLOW TO LITERATURE?
WILL THE INTERNET GIVE THE DEATH BLOW TO LITERATURE?

Summary/Abstract: The present communication is an approach to a socio-cultural epiphenomenon, which appeared with the unprecedented penetration of the Internet into the contemporary man’s life – in all fields of activity and in all possible forms. Within the sphere of literature, an important number of people express their apprehensions concerning the excessive virtualisation of everyday’s activity, which might keep the younger generation away from the normal reading habits. Within the intellectual milieus, there are predictions of an imminent disappearance of books, or even worse, of the death of literature, because of the addictive omnipresence of the Internet. According to these detractors of the informatic tools, the cyberspace – by offering an immediate, condensed and easy source of information – might replace the real, integral reading of books. We shall try to contradict these ‘apocalyptic’ predictions by showing that the Internet is not the enemy of literature, but, on the contrary, its best ally. Literature reading will not disappear, as long as the human race conserves its natural curiosity and its need for dreaming. Text digitalization is nothing but a natural consequence of the technical progress. The virtual libraries, the e-books, the audio books, the dramatized versions, the cinematographic transpositions, the on-line bookstores, the electronic dictionaries, the on-line encyclopaedias etc. – all these are just the next step after the epoch of the printed books. The “Gutenberg Galaxy” (according to Marshall McLuhan) is being replaced by the “Marconi Galaxy” (the electronic era); but this new stage of progress that we are witnessing now is the most revolutionary opening of human cultural patrimony towards the World; we shall call it “the Internet Galaxy”. It allows the globalization of knowledge, the common use of information and the sharing of literature, science and arts, all around the World. Books are not disappearing, they are just transforming and taking new shapes, in order to survive and face the present challenges.

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