| There have been three major media for publishing literary works: oral, manuscript, and print. Each affected the nature of literature itself. Oral literature is malleable--the words, and the way in which they were spoken vary from presentation to presentation, even when the reader is speaking from a written text. Script works are often "multi-media"--the text is frequently supplemented with art work of high quality, and they are often read aloud. Print literature tends to be more stable than its predecessors, and tends to communicate with the printed word only. A new medium literary communication--the Internet--contains elements of each of the three earlier media. However, there are aspects of the new medium that promise to be unique, hence new forms of literature are likely to develop with this new technology. |
