The Untrustworthy and Rewritten
Due to the ephemeral nature of things written on the web some experiential changes are affected in types of writing that have existed forever, but which are now made new and subtly different by the technical possibilities and limitations of the Internet.
I noted how many of the modernists Poets, evidently taken with Whitman’s lifelong tinkering with Leaves of Grass, kept editing and republishing new editions of their works.
Obviously you can make new versions of your work on the Internet, but that takes more work than just overwriting the old version, thereby destroying it (unless Internet Archive has archived it)
There are any number of narrative strategies in which the narrative is effectively gaslighting its readers as to what is actually going on. With the internet the narrative gaslighter gets the added tool of being able to go back into previously published versions or sections of the narrative and change it slightly or even extremely depending on the effect wanted.
This creates in the readers who have read and go back, or that may be directed back by linkage and misquotes, the aesthetic feeling of uncertainty, of a reality that cannot be trusted.
