For the fifth installment of [out of nothing], editors Janice Lee, Eric Lindley and Joe Milazzo made a conscious effort to explore the transformation of text into information that occurs whenever anything, even something as ostensibly unburdened with informational content as literature, is made accessible online. The design of this particular issue thus makes explicit reference to popular / customary layouts and interfaces encountered by users of the internet, but not for overtly satirical or parodic purposes. Rather, by appropriating and, in some cases, defacing, these "looks and feels" and by making the contents of the journal primarily accessible via a search function, the editors invite their audience to consider what it really means, experientially, to write, read and exist, both physically and virtually, online.

If the internet itself is a kind of void, a bottomless reservoir—yet simultaneously a destination—into which we as users continue to pour information... if the internet is essentially empty, especially as a social phenomenon (and thus a linguistic one: a new Facebook or Google+ profile has its origins in the blank, and has to be filled in / populated with rough translations of meat-realm "realities" into regularized, classifiable bits that can be digitally managed and manipulated)... and, if, from a publishing industry perspective, the internet has destroyed the economic bases for writing entirely, even going so far as to lay waste to literary culture altogether, having corrupted the language, replaced traditional modes of expression with formlessness, and elevated attention over literacy... then this is the nothing out of which the journal has grown, and into which it continues to delve, using whatever tools, including code, are at its editors' and contributors' disposal.