"Digital Writing Circa 2004" on Noemlab.org

An essay I wrote for a talk in England this last summer is up at Noema in
Italy in the Ideas section (in HTML and PDF) of the site:
http://www.noemalab.org/sections/ideas.php . The essay is called "Digital
Writing Circa 2004". An excerpt:

"A friend once told me there are basically two types of power in this world.
There's power that can be bestowed on you by other people, and there's your
own power. As an individual, as a human being, as a moral agent, as an
individual witness. And this is basically the power of the artist and the
individual human being more generally. And it is important to affirm this,
even in the face of what most artists experience, namely worldly failure
but, at times, victory of the spirit. What is worldly success in the absence
of a victory of the spirit? It is empty. Art can go deeper into the
machinery of our destinies than journalism typically does. And it is really
only only in such a context that any victory is meaningful beyond the
concourse of atoms.

My own feeling about digital writing is that it is still in its infancy on a
societal level, but has been developed into something like a strong
beginning by digital writers. It is in its infancy on the societal level in
the sense that peoples' consciousness of writing as a polyartistic
enterprise through several media is not as widely prevalent as print-minded
literacy. People do not have much of a sense of composition in several
media, and their reading skills of such work