956655

research-article2020
ICS0010.1177/1367877920956655International Journal of Cultural StudiesShakargy

International Journal of Cultural Studies

2021, Vol. 24(2) 325­–341
© The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1367877920956655
journals.sagepub.com/home/ics
https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877920956655

Original Article

Internetica: Poetry in
the digital age

Noa Shakargy
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

Abstract
This article proposes a new conceptual framework for understanding poetry in the age of the
internet. By combining literary and technologic theories into one theory named ‘Internetica’,
it typifies the structures and roles of internet poetry and poets. A grounded analysis of 200
poems revealed three types of web poems: poems about the internet, poems first published on
the internet, and poems written through the internet. The analysis presents various distinctions
among these three types of poems, including their subjects, length, and originality. An integrative
analysis of these categories allows for a redefinition of the role of poets in the digital age as playing
witnesses: ever-present internet users, who, thanks to their creativity, witness the medium while
playing with it by using the tools that it offers them.

Keywords
digital art, Facebook, poetry, popular culture, sociology of the arts

The internet and its platforms expand the creative expression of both professional and
amateur writers. The internet influences all literature and especially poetry; therefore, in
the digital age, the social status of poetry and poetics is evolving. Poetry is everywhere: in
specialized websites and forums and on social media such as Facebook, Instagram, and
Twitter. But poetry also infiltrates previously uncharted waters, such as programming,
coding, and Deep Learning. It seems that the internet allows for a significant increase in
the number of texts that are considered poetry and the number of people who are consid-
ered poets. This is because poetry is self-defined since authors can frame various texts as
poetry and because the internet continuously generates new textual structures, such as

Corresponding author:
Noa Shakargy, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mount Scopus 91905, Jerusalem, 9190501, Israel.
Email: nshakargy@gmail.com
326 International Journal of Cultural Studies 24(2)

chats, and help guides. So far, despite its great social importance, poetry in the digital age
has been understudied and, sometimes, misunderstood.
Previous research focused on describing single literary phenomena, such as digital
poetry or web-related uncreative writing, without defining web poetry or finding links
between occurrences. This article aims to aggregate and compare all manifestations of
aesthetic texts related to the internet, thematically, publication-wise, or technologically;
it aims to relate to them as variations of a single phenomenon. Thus, this article will offer
the first comprehensive account of what I call ‘Internetica’: the sphere of intersections
between the internet, social media and poetics.
This article examines digital poetry that was published in Israel as a case study. The
Israeli poetry scene is extremely dynamic and innovative in general (with 700 poetry
books published every year), and it is particularly innovative in its use of technology,
echoing the perception that Israel is a start-up nation. Additionally, some of the promi-
nent poets comprising the field of Internetica are based in Israel. Therefore, Israel pro-
vides a case study for the relationship between the internet and poetry that can reflect
global phenomena.
The article will address three questions: (1) What are the features of Israeli internet
poetics? (2) What do these features convey about writing in the digital age? (3) What do
these features reveal about the internet’s influence on poetry and poets?
In the first part of this article, I discuss the existing literature on internet poetry,
focusing on three main research strands: changes in poetry distribution, digital poetry,
and online literary communities. Afterward, I present the findings of my grounded
analysis of 200 poems: poems describing the rise of the internet, digital poetry, and
poems published in a Facebook community page I ran for this research between the
years 2012 and 2014. I then describe three general roles of the internet that emerged
from this analysis: the internet as a means of testimony, a professional tool, and a play-
ground. These three roles correspond with three roles that the internet plays in poetry:
poems about the internet are usually testimonies; for poems first published on the
internet, the internet is a tool; and poems which were written through the internet are
usually an act of playfulness. An analysis of these roles produced an extensive typol-
ogy that suggests an overarching understanding of the changing functionalities of
poetry in the digital age.

Literature review
Early studies in the field of literature in the digital age expressed the hope that the
internet would change poetry radically and that internet poetry would be significantly
innovative (López, 2012). However, as time passes, research shows that the traditional
form of poetry is still much more prevalent than the experimental digital form.
Nowadays, it seems the internet has influenced poetry mainly in terms of quantity:
above all, the internet increased the number of poets and poetry readers (Stein, 2010).
Research on digital poetry has focused mainly on three realms: (1) changes in poetry
distribution; (2) new writing techniques made possible via the medium (known as
e-poetry, new media poetry, digital poetry, and computer poems), and (3) online liter-
ary communities.
Shakargy 327

Distribution
The first strand of existing research deals with poetry distribution (Bar-Ilan and Groisman,
2003; Bolter, 2001; Glazier 2002). It shows that new possibilities for poetry distribution
arise due to the general curiosity about the web as well as the dramatic weakening of the
former literary spaces described by Bolter, including poetry readings, university litera-
ture departments, and book and newspaper distribution (Bolter, 2001). Previous research
presented the new possibilities provided by the internet to the 21st-century poet: the abil-
ity to shatter hierarchical systems, employ one’s generative powers, indulge in fluidity,
interact, share, and use multiple platforms.
Poets now have an opportunity to shatter hierarchical barriers, which were reinforced
by the former means of production, and publish their poems on the web without precon-
ditions or costs (Hayles, 2006). For example, poems can be published on Facebook or
book printing can be funded through public-benefit cooperation such as Kickstarter. In
some cases, one’s popularity with readers, which was gained by bypassing hierarchical
institutions in the first place, later promotes acceptance by literary institutions that gradu-
ally adopt popularity as a measure of quality. The generative text can be edited repeat-
edly and displayed in diverse contexts, without obligation or exclusivity that are
conventional in print (Perloff, 2006). Furthermore, the fluidity of the internet allows the
poet to change old standards whereby the publishing of the poem is the last stage of the
creative process. Hence, the act of publishing on the web becomes a helpful editing pro-
cess and does not obligate the poet to come to a final version of the poem (Hayles, 2006).
The internet offers poets an intermediate situation between writing for themselves and
publishing a book (Neiger and Abdullayev 2011). Hence, the online literary creator has
a better entry point into the traditional literary world, since one may gain recognition
from followers in the online community regardless of traditional publication, such as the
literary magazines (Hockx, 2005). The internet encourages the poets to communicate
with their readers via social networks, email, and chats, which makes contemporary
poetry interactive and shared (Parish, 2008). The creative community on the web is an
expression of the poets’ desire for a lively discussion with readers about their work. A
study from 2003 that sampled a subset of websites found that poetry constitutes 70% of
the literary texts on the web (Bar-Ilan and Groisman, 2003). This contributes to the fact
that the majority of online literary discourse concerns poetry.
The integration of writing and publishing offered by the internet assists the process of
self-discovery, emotional release, confidence building, and the honing of writing profi-
ciency. The online community affects literary creation through dialogue, commentary,
and the provision of feedback during the creative work (Neiger and Abdullayev, 2011).
The broad range of poets and poetics on the internet encourages web poets to think as
advertisers; what concerns them is matching specific poems to different audiences in
diverse platforms and contexts in order to enlarge the relevance of their works by apply-
ing to multiple targeted communities. Moreover, through the unsorted crowd online the
poet can display her poems to readers who are not the audience of poetry books or liter-
ary supplements. This technique reflects the current long-tailed distribution of poetry: it
is no longer important that one publication appears in the best place in a newspaper; what
is important is that many publications appear in various locations.
328 International Journal of Cultural Studies 24(2)

Digital poetry
The second strand of existing research deals with digital poetry. The internet instills new
poetic writing techniques and upgrades old ones, including collaborative writing through
chat rooms and using Ready-Made and writing programmed phrases (Goldsmith, 2011).
Digital poetry is poetry that one can write or access thanks to the evolution of digital
media, and it is often a form of conceptual writing. Relevant examples are ‘Google
poetry’, which is based on Google Search and algorithmic poetry, involving code-run-
ning on large textual data such as traffic reports or the Bible.
In 1998, Cayley claimed that poets wishing to use the internet in their work cannot
settle for exploring the internet’s surface. Instead, they must penetrate the internet’s
interface and mechanism and understand the contemporary meaning of production
(Cayley, 1998). Cayley’s argument is repeated by present digital poetry researchers who
define internet poetry as an uncreative, experimental, and conceptual writing, which has
a hardwired connection to the web apparatus. It enables the internet to be more than a
publishing tool and become a lingual substance (Goldsmith, 2011; Perloff, 2010; Stein,
2010). Moreover, Flores describes internet poetry as independent poetry that does not
echo the transference process from former media to the internet (Flores, 2014).
The dominance of technology in digital poetry is represented, for instance, in the
conversion of the obsessive romantic narcissism in poetry to the obsessive ‘narci-sys-
tem’, which is the mechanical lyricism (Glazier, 2002). The internet poetic speaker is not
human but mechanical, while the actions of this speaker are imposed by the human poet
(who, perhaps, chooses to write a haiku), forcing the machine to create what seems to be
unnatural poetry. This reflects the role reversal between the medium and the message:
the mediator is a human poet, while the message – the poem and its speaker, is the com-
puterized protocol. The algorithmic protocol and repetitive code become personified by
an aestheticized creative process.
Uncreative writing is regarded as the most dominant technique in digital poetry,
emerging from the ease of copying and pasting texts on the computer, the tendency to
imitate works of art in the internet age, and the massive general influence of Dada and its
delayed effect on the literary sphere (Goldsmith, 2011). Dada transformed the industrial
into the artistic and the used into the new. Uncreative writing is textual Dada, allowing
the poet to transform existing and sometimes even public texts into fresh and personal
work. Perloff describes uncreative writing as the highest inspiration of the poet in the
21st century. Uncreative work gains its authenticity from ‘life experience’, namely, the
fact that it has already been used (Perloff, 2010). The ‘copy-paste’ practice and web dis-
tribution options merge into a powerful tool that has changed poetry-making similarly to
the transformation of painting through the invention of the camera: shifting from tech-
nique (a proficient hand) to technology (hobby instrument). Uncreative poets are no
longer writers; instead, they are makers and curators of existing texts. The readers, in
turn, can navigate, program, copy, design, and republish the poem (Morris, 2006).
Unlike the permanent book publishing standards, the performance of a digital poem
turns the poem in Hayles’s words ‘from object to event’ (Hayles, 2006: 181). The poet
can choose every feature of the display, such as the font type, size, and color, the place-
ment of the text in space, and text animation (2006: 181). While the appearance of the
Shakargy 329

text in a book is fixed, the performance of the digital poem is surprising and infinite:
each click on the ‘refresh’ button creates a new poem. This attribute transforms digital
poetry into experimental poetry. Hence, digital poetry changes the poetic coordinates in
three main aspects. First, the poet becomes a scientist of new media and explores its
possibilities through poetry. Second, the poem becomes a web-narrative experiment,
since most digital poetry has abandoned the prevalent narrative structure (with the poet
as an individual storyteller) and has adopted the technological and mechanical narra-
tive. For example, when writing a Google-poem with Google Autocomplete, the poets
inform their audience about crowd wisdom through crowd skills. And, lastly, the digital
poem deals with mechanisms, codes, and software: this is the background of the inter-
face (Morris, 2006). If literary intertextuality renders poetry exclusive by inviting the
proficient reader and rejecting the ignorant, digital poetry replicates this position by
subverting artistic conventions for artistic creation (following Dada), while requiring
technological skills, like programming.

Online literary communities

The third strand of existing research deals with online literary communities and their
significance for internet poets (Bar-Ilan and Groisman, 2003; Hamidi and Baljko, 2012;
Hockx, 2005). Online literary communities are networks of artists that get together and
publish their poems on platforms, including social networks, mailing lists, and forums
wherein readers can read, respond, and discuss writing experiences and meanings. These
communities are extremely active and prolific in terms of publishing works and the
extent of the discussions. Therefore, poems published in online literary communities cre-
ate a vast and influential corpus. The online literary community is created by the social
networks that allow users to meet in a virtual public space and discuss various personal
and professional issues.
It seems that the dominance of the web community is unrelated to the poetic text itself
and is tied to the new methods of production and distribution. Hockx (2005) mentions
the contempt that some feel towards online literary communities’ poetry, which, he
believes, arises from misguided assumptions that it is an unfiltered version of printed
poetry. However, he believes that online community literature is an independent genre
with its own textual and extra-textual characteristics. Some of the genre’s characteristics
relate directly to the text, including political and biographical themes that provide a
broader relevance and interest, much like political commentary or newspaper gossip
columns. Other characteristics of this genre are less discernible, like the poet’s motiva-
tion for writing and the mechanisms of creative collaborations.
While in the era of print poetry was read by the few, in the web era poetry is the pub-
lic’s domain. The interaction between users encourages a ‘Dialectical Poetry’ (De Mann,
1979) that is written due to the poet’s community-oriented goals. While writing in the
traditional literary sphere required totality and ideologies, community poetry-writing on
the web is a lifestyle choice of young internet users, who regard themselves as relevant
to the internet’s writers’ community which mediate their everyday lives and thoughts to
their community through aesthetic texts (Hockx, 2005). This poetry legitimizes loose
expression with or without literary aspirations (Hamidi and Baljko, 2012). Social media
330 International Journal of Cultural Studies 24(2)

play an essential role in the canonizing process: each work is graded openly by Likes and
Shares that cause the item to reappear repeatedly. In this process the known is popular,
and the popular will be good (Webster and Lin, 2002). This model influences contempo-
rary poetry conventions. When a poem becomes popular on Facebook, it often seeps into
literary magazines or other traditional literary institutions that reprint these poems and
the poets are invited by literary institutions to participate in festivals and reading, thus
promoting the poets’ acceptance.
Another aspect of the uncommitted poetic tendencies of online literary communities
is found in evaluation. In the internet era, evaluation is based on emotional and intuitive
explanations, unlike the traditional scholarly literary standard, which is based on the
knowledgeable analysis of form and content (Hockx, 2005). This model results from the
existence of multiple words-artists in a community that lacks critical proficiency and
intent. Therefore, criticism is irrelevant to the community’s values and it is replaced by
mutual responsibility. Lack of criticism and generous feedback contribute to the creative
space that contains different themes, styles, and qualities held and affected together
(Hamidi and Baljko, 2012).
Despite this plethora of work and the separate classification of each sub-phenomenon,
an examination of Internetica’s core and an overarching understanding of the isolated
phenomena is still lacking. Indeed, creative practices on the web often remain unre-
marked upon because of the quality of invention (Deuze, 2007).
In what follows, I will demonstrate that these three main research strands on changes
in literary means of production, the rise of digital poetry, and the formation of online
literary communities correspond with three dominant types of poems that are being writ-
ten throughout the last decade.

Method
Sample
The purpose of this research is to formulate the concept of Internetica through grounded
analysis of Hebrew-language poem (Starks and Trinidad, 2007). The lack of previous
relevant research addressing all three types of digital poetry created a need to amass a
large corpus of internet poems, which, indeed, I collected over a period of two years, to
be as comprehensive as possible. I selected only poems that simultaneously matched
each of the following criteria: (1) poems wherein the internet played a dominant role
regarding their text, as a subject, a linguistic material, or a metaphor; (2) poems whose
poet had a certain degree of centrality in the literary community, represented by their
affiliation to publishing houses, literary awards, literary reviews, or a wide readership. I
set these criteria to delimit the scope of materials to the most ‘Internetic’ poems while
enabling the inclusion of the majority of poets in Israel. I selected poems for my corpus
from different realms in several steps. First, I classified poems that included references
to new applications, web links, and internet jargon that were published in poetry books,
which are the traditional locus of poetry. Second, I chose to focus on Maayan Poetry
Magazine (2005–15). Maayan is the most experimental magazine in the Israeli poetry
scene. Surveying the magazine’s ten volumes added to my corpus innovative, digital, and
Shakargy 331

collaborative writing that contributed to all three groups. Third, I surveyed each of the 45
poetry books that were published between the years 2002 and 2015 by established pub-
lishing houses (as opposed to self-publishing). I identified 29 relevant books that included
100 internet poems altogether, most of them relating to the internet as a subject.
In addition, to examine not only poems about the internet but also poems first pub-
lished on the internet, I created a Facebook page called POEMA and ran it as an internet
poetry research laboratory between the years 2012 and 2014. POEMA was a community
page that posted previously unpublished original poems, sent to the page by their authors.
Poems were published five days a week, one poem a day. Contrary to what is customary
in literary editorial boards, in POEMA there was no sorting process. The page worked as
a ‘reality contest’. Each published poem had 48 hours to gain Likes, comments, and
Shares. The poem that became most popular over the week, garnering both positive or
negative comments, was posted again on Saturday night with my short critique. POEMA
had 2885 subscribers and, during the period of its activity, the page reached 5000 to
30,000 readers every week, depending on the poems that were published. Surprisingly,
most POEMA poems did not use the internet as a subject, yet they did include themes of
writing and publishing, as well as techniques that may be associated with digital poetry.
Moreover, because the poems were first published on Facebook, I labeled them as
Internetica. During 100 weeks of activity, 350 authors from various walks of life were
published on POEMA: young and old, amateur and professional. For this article, I ana-
lyzed the 85 poems that won the POEMA weekly competition. An examination of the
winning poems allows one to reach conclusions regarding the preferences of the readers
in the online literary community.

Analysis
In my work, I followed the principles of grounded analysis. Hence, the research findings
were produced by the inductive method: the investigation of accumulating details led to
the creation of categories that could be distinguished and compared (Strauss and Corbin,
1998). The analytical process was divided into three steps, designed to produce axes of
theme and form. First, the poems were classified according to the internet’s role in the
poem, leading to the emergence of three clusters: poems that regard the internet as a
means of testimony, a professional tool of the poet, or a playground. Second, the poems
were divided by their aesthetic characteristics, including their type of humor, form, length,
and internet jargon. These characteristics became part of the categories of the following
analysis. The third stage intersected the previous ones to produce a more general classifi-
cation into three types of poems: Poems about the internet, poems first published on the
internet, and poems that were written through the internet. This categorization resonates
with Markham’s (2004) definition of the internet as a tool, a place, and a way of living.

Findings
Each of the three main poem types (summarized in Table 1) symbolizes a type of poetry,
a type of poet, and a stage within the spectrum of internet adaptation. Poems about the
internet, arising from the early days of the medium, incorporate documentary qualities as
332 International Journal of Cultural Studies 24(2)

Table 1.  An overview of the three main types of Internetica.

Poems about the Poems first published Poems which were

internet on the internet written through the
internet
Subject matter Testimony Testimony and a Testimony, play and
and play professional tool a professional tool
Medium of Books Web Books and web
publication
Community Literary community Alternative Web artists
recognition by readers
Dominant Lingual Social Technological
proficiency
Length Nanopoetics Nanopoetics Long poetry cycles
(poems up to 12 lines)
to long poetry cycles
Originality In text and subject Authenticity Conceptual
matter
Conceptualism Conceptual Non-conceptual Conceptual
Humor Parody Satire Pastiche

they reflect the foreignness and discomfort of interacting with and through the internet,
which is likely to disappear as users gradually adapt. The cultural temporality of the
‘poems about the internet’ group endows these poems with a special status: the subject
of these poems is not only the internet as a medium or practice, but as a profound cultural
change that has to be coped with. As opposed to the first group, poems first published on
the internet, oftentimes on social media, use poetry as an experimental path to communi-
cate with others and tell about the writers’ everyday lives, more than as an aesthetic form
that is focused on style. These poems are characterized by clarity, communicativeness,
and that they deal with current affairs. Poems which are first published on the internet
function as the writers’ studio, which enables users to become short-term poets, or maybe
help them discover whether they truly have a poetic calling. Poems that are created by
internet tools, such as Autocomplete and code, use the internet to override emotional
poetic formulas. The poets who advocate for this type of poem regard poetry as a limited
mode of communication, used by those who wish to express their emotions. Instead, they
suggest that the internet can enrich poetry by replacing the familiar formula with an imi-
tation of the medium or an imitation of its users. In what follows, I will compare these
three main types of Internetica according to the eight coordinates featured in Table 1:
subject matter, medium of publication, community, dominant proficiency, length, origi-
nality, conceptualism, and humor.

Subject matter
A thematic analysis of the corpus yielded three principal kinds of subject matter: the
poem as a means of testimony, as a professional tool, and as play. All three kinds of sub-
ject matter are deeply linked to the internet’s general roles.
Shakargy 333

The poem as a means of testimony is a conventional technique that is derived from the
status of the text as reflective evidence and from the understanding of poetry as eternal
(Moxley et al., 2011). ‘Writing is a technology for collective memory for preserving and
passing on human experience’ (Bolter, 1991: 33). The task of the poets is to curate the
present by grasping a moment of dramatic cultural change, a moment that affects them
directly, and they preserve it in the collective memory. This tendency is identified mainly
in poems about the internet and also in poems written through the internet.
The corpus of analyzed poems displays four kinds of testimony. The first kind is a
testimony about testimony: namely, writing about the documentary nature of the internet.
‘I searched myself in Google / and couldn’t find,’ says the speaker in Ayat Abou Shmeiss’s
poem, ‘Google’ (Shmeiss, 2013: 6). The second kind of testimony bears witness to the
way the internet has influenced every individual and, particularly, the poet. For example,
the unspecific, diverse, and supportive community is dominant in the work of 21st-cen-
tury poets like Alfred Cohen. In his poem ‘Hello Google’, the speaker says, ‘I asked
Google / what is writing a poem? / Can you live without poems? / will Alfred Cohen ever
write a poem?’ (Cohen, 2013: 13). The third kind of testimony attests to the changes in
the social environment, with the novel addition of dating sites and social media. The
fourth kind of testimony addresses the changes in culture and literature brought about by
the medium itself. Such is uncreative writing, as seen in the poem ‘Terms of Use’ by Eran
Hadas: ‘I make love on the net / When I expose my love, anyone online can see it / And
I can see theirs / I am no longer ashamed / I share’ (Hadas, 2013: 9–11).
Numerous poems, mainly poems about the internet, reflect the significance of the
internet as a professional tool for the poet. Poets use the medium in various ways to
amplify their independence in their creative work, when writing, publishing, book print-
ing, selling, and maintaining contact with their readers (Hockx, 2005). Poems that regard
the internet as a professional tool are those that incorporate internet slang, and those that
use the web as a tool for distribution, creativity, and the preservation and enlargement of
the poetic community, which is achieved, for example, by intense presence in social
networks. Almost regardless of the poets’ will, the medium transforms them into multi-
taskers and sole manufacturers, as Tehila Hakimi writes in her poem ‘Poets’: ‘And then
/ all poets became friends / on social media: / all poets became enemies. / Later / all on
one stage / Stomping their feet / Blinding spotlight in their eyes / Cannot read one word’
(Hakimi, 2014: 25). The tools allocated to the poets by the internet compel them to
become responsible for their art and to relieve the power centers of their cultural duties.
In this independent era, the poets’ role evolves when they become the editors and cura-
tors of the text.
The third and most important subject matter of digital poetry is play and playfulness,
following Danet’s distinction of play as playing by the rules and playfulness as playing
with the rules (Danet, 2001). Playfulness is also one of the most common attributes of the
electronic text (Bolter, 2001: 165). Web 2.0, a sphere of user-generated content, encour-
ages play and creativity due to the abundance of texts, such as jokes, memes, and linguis-
tic games (Katz and Shifman, 2017). These creative phenomena frame the internet as a
realm of playfulness, combining serious and original content, such as news, with creative
and playful variations, such as mash-ups and jokes (Shifman, 2014). Play that takes place
on the internet quickly becomes a permanent cultural act, for even if it occurred once, it
334 International Journal of Cultural Studies 24(2)

is saved as a cultural creation that will occur again (Huizinga, 1955). Still, due to the
medium’s innovative nature, the internet invites users to break the rules over and over
again and invent new ones.
The web’s playful essence influences poetry and encourages poets to conduct artistic
and poetic play while using the internet, for example, by engaging in collaborative writ-
ing while using chat interfaces. The playful nature of the internet is identified in various
ways, such as extra-textual performances, linguistic amusement, collaborative writing,
uncreative writing, and using ready-mades, programmed poems, or Google Autocomplete
poems. Internet poems partake in the experimental environment of the internet. They
reflect the medium as a large text-bank, which provides poets unending opportunities to
play with texts and text forms by distorting existing texts and creating new ones. The
artistic playfulness functions as a cultural practice (Siegert, 2008) and becomes a new
requirement for contemporary poetry. Therefore, in the internet environment, the writ-
ing of a poem is no longer a private and emotional process: it is social playing.
The three subject matters (that match the roles of the internet in digital poetry) inter-
sect differently with each type of poem. Poems about the internet, like Cohen’s poem
cited above, include aspects relating to testimony and playing while disregarding the new
possibilities introduced by the internet to the poet. This is due to the writer’s limited use
of distribution options, digital creative tools, and online literary communities. Poems
first published on the internet function as testimonies while regarding the internet as the
poet’s professional tool, such as Mordechai Geldman’s poems ‘Daily Haiku in Facebook
via iPhone’ (Geldman, 2013: 98). These findings match the nature of social media, which
functions as a semi-public diary wherein users document their lives. However, the testi-
monial aspects presented by these poems often relate to the assistance that the medium
provides the writers via the new options of writing, publishing, and distribution of their
work. Poems that were written through the internet expressed all three subject matters:
the internet as a means of testimony, a professional tool, and an act of playfulness. These
poems bear witness to the values of the internet (for instance, the value of sharing), they
indirectly refer to the internet as a professional tool while using machine syntax, and they
combine playing with functioning as a playground, whether the playing is between the
user and the machine or between two or more users.

The medium of publication

My corpus of poems shows that the medium of publication is a very telling matter. It
demonstrates the poets’ relationship with traditional literature, signifies a wish (or lack
thereof) to communicate with the established literary community, and reflects the poets’
attitude towards the internet. Additionally, the medium of publication can also reflect the
poets’ changing perception of the internet: while at first, it was an unfamiliar and unwel-
come instrument, it soon became a necessary tool that is worthy of poetry publication.
For example, ‘Comment poem 162’ by Tomer Lichtash: ‘To publish poetry? Here? Now?
/ Better off bury the kids / in the yard’ (Lichtash, 2007: 162). The internet was the theme
of all the poems that were published in print that were included in the corpus. These
poems, written by professional poets and published since 2002 and increasingly after
Shakargy 335

2007, were either part of conceptual books or poem cycles or published as stand-alone
poems in poetry books.
Contrastingly, most of the poems in the corpus that were first published on the web
(hence, published without filtering) were written by amateur writers, who are not pre-
sent in the traditional literary sphere, or by poets who integrate the printed and digital
creation. Later, based on this integration, some promote a book by publishing single
poems in the online literary community. By doing so, not only do they raise awareness
for their book, but they also provide their poem with another editing process via the
social network. Furthermore, the social network even boosts book publishing aspira-
tions among amateur poets, because the online community provides encouragement and
commitment.
Mostly, amateur poets have not yet gained the recognition of literary institutions. The
internet is more identified with the amateur poet, yet print is not necessarily sign of pro-
fessionalism. Amateur poets’ publications often depend entirely on their will, via paid or
self-published books, Facebook pages, and self-promotion through digital platforms.
The amateur phase is usually temporary for two reasons: first, the internet blurs the
qualitative distinction, and almost every poet gets some recognition; second, the media
adopts amateur poets frequently in efforts to discover talents. Still, some amateur poets
stay away from the literary field, focusing on reaching their readers through social net-
works and online sales. This distinction is flexible and designed to distinguish the char-
acteristics of the traditional poet, along with his values, aspirations, and community,
from those of the contemporary internet poet.
Poems which were written through the internet and included in my corpus were
mainly distributed in print, but naturally, due to the way they were written, they first
appeared on the internet.

Community
The analysis of the corpus has highlighted the distinctions between the composers of
each type of poem. Poems about the internet were written by poets who are known to
the literary community and their internet poem is not their first publication. Poems
which were first published on the internet were usually written by unknown, amateur
poets, taking their first steps in poetry through the online literary community. True,
these amateur poets desire the recognition of the literary community; however, they
usually earn this recognition through their popularity on social networks. At the
beginning of their literary path, this helps them skip the filtering and critical judgment
of literary gatekeepers. Often, these poets publish a new poem on Facebook first,
whereas poets of the literary community ‘save’ a new poem and first print it in a news-
paper, a literary magazine, or a book. Later, they may post a photo of the published
poem online.
Usually, poets who write poems through the internet are not central to the literary
community. They are motivated by innovation, rebellion against literary tradition, and,
above all, by their estrangement from emotions, which is the essence of traditional
poetry. Such poets find their place in the margins of poetry and the online artist
community.
336 International Journal of Cultural Studies 24(2)

Dominant proficiency
Each of the three types of poems demonstrates a different proficiency that is expected
from the poet. Literary skills, such as using the internet as a metaphor, parodying earlier
texts, and using linguistic games are the most prevalent among poems about the internet.
Daniel Oz’s metaphors are an example of this: ‘our flesh, what’s in it? / a hidden network
of links / fragile panels . . . the moan of an internal fan’ (Oz, 2013: 7).
In poems that were first published on the internet, mainly on social media, one can
identify another proficiency: social skills. This type of poetry is interlaced with the
medium of publication because it encourages interactivity and demands the readers’ par-
ticipation by writing about a personal crisis, current issues in politics, society, or in the
literary milieu. On social media, poets assign great importance to their readers, who
contribute not only to the virality of their poems but also to their status in the literary
field. Poets are attentive and thoughtful toward their readers; they match their publica-
tions to the mood of their network and try to lead their small community of followers by
transcribing their feelings. However, they are also aware of the many other writers
around them who are trying to do the exact same thing. This phenomenon was identified
in other artistic fields, as well (Baym, 2018).
Poems which were written through the internet introduced a novelty: a flood of tech-
nologically savvy poets. Poems written through the internet are usually written by poets
who are proficient in a whole set of technological techniques, spanning from Google
Search to programming. These skills are obligatory for this kind of artist. The stereotypi-
cal absent-minded poet is seldom credited with any technological abilities, and the ste-
reotypical solitary poet is seldom credited with social skills. But these proficiencies,
which the internet now requires of poets, dramatically change the latter’s identity in the
21st century. Poets are no longer naive wanderers but rather professionals, who are aware
of the means of production that they are capitalizing on.
Perloff (2005) defines the poets’ skills in the internet age as ‘moving information’, a
double entendre that establishes that web poetics employ internet data, which is both in
motion (as it is constantly re-edited and updated) and exciting (due to its colossal quan-
tity). Perloff refers only to technological poets who write through the internet but this
study of Internetica reveals two distinct subgroups: technological poets, who write by
using data-in-motion, including refashioning large existing texts like the Bible or help
guides; and social poets, who use data to ‘move’ and stir their readers’ emotions.

Length
The corpus shows that the rise of the internet resulted in a surge of short literary forms.
This emergence is expressed both by the invention of new structures (chat poems, sta-
tuses) and the popularity of existing ones (haikus, word sonnets). Printed poems about
the internet are becoming shorter and transforming into Nanopoetics, a literary genre
defined by Meiri (2010). The term links the concept of nanotechnology that compresses
information with poetry that compresses meaning into short texts: ‘Nano-poetics bor-
rows two relevant qualities of nanotechnology for use in the interpretation of poetry:
miniaturisation and duplication’ (Meiri, 2010). The length of Nano poems is 12-line
poetical fragments and short stories.
Shakargy 337

Poems that were first published on the internet are even shorter than that: most of the
winning poems in POEMA had no more than ten lines. When the poem is posted online,
outside of the printed book, crammed between jokes, news clips, and birthday greetings,
it must be short and well-targeted to be noticed. Otherwise, readers will scroll to the next
thing. When the text is shorter lengthwise, it is often shorter content-wise, as well. The
only lengthy web poems are the spoken-word creations, whose size stems from the nar-
rative and performative character of the genre.
Unlike the short poems in books and social media, poems that were written through
the internet are usually long cycles of fragments that were transformed into concept
books, like Code by Eran Hadas and Lorem Ipsum by Tomer Lichtash. It is possible
that when poets engage in programming and editing work rather than writing, they
prefer to work with a significant volume of text. However, alongside the technical
reasons for this, writing a poem that is long and un-narrative in the short-and-fast inter-
net atmosphere is subversive. This act forces both the writer and the reader to concen-
trate on an explicitly ‘boring’ text, which loses the right to exist in a cultural sphere
where ‘likes’ are sovereign.

Originality
All three types of poems in my corpus present the tension between the poets’ wish to
innovate and their ability to be innovative. The web poets’ seeming unoriginality can be
original by creating new forms of poetry, and may even function as a rebellion against
conventional poetry that values originality. Poems about the internet that were published
in print seem to be original, both because of the text that is new and not borrowed like
ready-made poetry and because of the novelty of the subject matter, which, chronologi-
cally, preceded the other types of internet poetry.
In poems which were first published on the internet, textual originality is a non-issue
since these writers regard poetry as a lifestyle-oriented technique rather than a form of
art, reminiscent of photography, which is only sometimes artistic. This ‘photographic’
poetry treats everyday life events like famous monuments, which will be photographed
again by the next visitor. Writing this sort of poem is a matter of placement, like placing
a camera and searching for an individual point of view, instead of using specific artistic
skills. Here, poetry is not an art form but a way of living, and, as such, it does not regard
originality as an aesthetic goal.
In fact, online literary communities are searching for another form of originality: the
speakers’ authenticity (Hockx, 2005). The authenticity of web poets is measured by their
ability to design a reliable, fascinating, and poetic biography. Internet writing techniques
such as posting multiple versions, displaying typos, employing various linguistic styles,
and including user discussions contribute to the sense of authenticity.
In contrast, poems written through internet-related technologies create an originality
that is external to the text by shifting the focal point away from the text into the concept.
One example of original conceptual poetry is demonstrated in Code (Hadas, 2014), a
book of haiku poems generated by programming the first part of the Bible through a
designated algorithm. The internet poet employs a new concept to fearlessly repeat what
was previously said.
338 International Journal of Cultural Studies 24(2)

Conceptualism
Conceptual poetry is based on a leading idea, formal or thematic that is prior to the text
formation (Goldsmith, 2008). Unlike non-conceptual poetry that is a performance of the
poet, conceptual poetry makes poetry performance of a specific idea. Conceptualism is a
central aspect of Internetica. An analysis of the three types of poems demonstrates that
poems that were written through the internet are conceptual poetry. This poetry has two
central concepts. The first concept is ‘narci-system’, which is performed by program-
ming, Autocomplete, and text recycling, which extracts from the automatic machine
what seems to be an unnatural syntax. The second concept is the imitation of internet
forms, such as help guides, chats, and other structures. Such poetry ridicules the bounda-
ries of the device and reflects the blunt discourse among online users.
While machine poetry is distinctly conceptual, the other two poetic types are different.
In the corpus, poems about the internet are only vaguely conceptual. This sort of concep-
tualism is not figurative but substantive, as it emerges when one commits to a theme, for
example: ‘instead of the slow opening / searching inside the keyhole . . . double click /
and you’re there’ by Zali Gurevitch (Gurevitch, 2008: 53). These poems describe the age
of the internet as a new world, wherein the internet is a subject or an idea around which
the poem is woven. Due to the traditional traits of this group, these poems are perceived
as conventional and regarded as traditional poetry addressing a new subject.
Corpus poems first published on the internet are neither conceptual nor innovative.
Quite the opposite: most of them are held captive by the traditional image of poetry as a
text that expresses the speaker’s feelings regarding the holy trinity of poetry: God, love,
and nature. These poems usually depict the speaker as an archaic figure that personifies
the stereotypical pompous poet. For this reason, these poets are far-removed from the
perception of poetry as avant-garde art.

Humor
Humor is very present in internet culture (Shifman, 2007) so an examination of its pres-
ence in Internetica is significant. Indeed, I found that all three types of Internetica incor-
porate humor, yet they tend to use it differently and for various purposes. The analysis
revealed three humoristic notions: parody, identifiable by the references to specific texts
while using quotations or accurate imitations; satire, conveying a critical message about
the unmediated reality; and pastiche, the blank parody and unspecific imitation.
The corpus of poems about the internet used in this study often use parody techniques
to imitate the iconic genres related to this medium, such as chats, comments, and auto-
matic texts of help guides. In these poems, a slight irony arises when the poet links the
semantics of the technological field and those of other fields, like comparing the milking
cows at dawn and ‘milking’ one’s computer first thing in the morning: ‘At first light . . .
I’m awakened on my bed of straw next to the computer / and milk it. / At the third star I
fall asleep to the sound of its snore’s rustle’ (Haimovich, 2010: 52). In contrast, poems
that were first published on the internet tend to convey satirical content, protesting politi-
cal and social issues by offering a reflection of reality. In comparison to these two types,
poems written by the internet can be depicted as pastiche; hence, this is an unspecific
Shakargy 339

parody that stems from the imitation and citation of multiple former texts and shaping
them as an automatic text. Overall, the varying types of humor in internet poetry reflect
a shift of focus from the era of the intellectual poet, marked by literary education, vast
reading, and hierarchical mechanisms, to an age when poetry is written by everyone
about everything and published everywhere.

Conclusion
In his book Production of Presence, Gumbrecht (2004) describes two aspects of the liter-
ary experience. One is the ‘meaning effect’, which subordinates the text to its potential
meanings. The other is the ‘presence effect’, in which the reading itself is an experience
that transforms the recipients from readers to participants, who are free of the obligation
to search for a specific meaning. For a long time, the ‘meaning effect’ was considered
central and the ‘presence effect’ incidental. However, in the past twenty years, the power
balance has shifted, and internet poetry is one of the leaders of this trend. Internet poets
produce extended sequences and conceptual books of experimental poetry, thereby
strengthening the ‘presence effect.’ The internet encourages the poets to forsake meaning
and to be present in their creative sphere continuously, and to write and publish books at
short intervals and in large quantities.
As my classification suggests, Internetica, at least as revealed in Hebrew-language
poetry, is a broad field comprising multiple and diverse literary texts, all of which follow
the internet or relate to its development. One wonders, therefore, what additional meanings
could arise from this relationship. Is there a connecting thread between the three poetic
types, transcending their association with the internet? The integrative analysis reveals a
shared meaning, embodied in the poets’ role in the creation of a certain ‘presence effect’. I
dub this the ‘playing witness’. Being creative and ever-present users of the medium, the
poets witness the medium and play with it by using its language and technological tools.
The poets are witnesses who are also active players, depicting the technological changes of
this era for future generations: not as historians, but as creators. The Aristotelian distinction
between the historian and the poet is that while the former describes life as it happened, the
latter describes it as it could have happened (Aristotle, 1974: 11).
Internet poems fulfill the creative possibilities that the medium offers and break from
fundamental literary questions relating to originality and quality that were asked until
recently. For the internet poet, poetry is a way of life, a routine. As such, it is not pre-
sented only through complete and successful moments but is an exact illustration of the
creation, including the process of trial and error, which aims not only for quality and
acceptance but also for boundary-breaking, joy, and liberation.
The internet provides poets with various opportunities and challenges that compel
researchers to catch up quickly and draw a relevant and clear map that will serve readers,
and the poets themselves – professionals who are flooded by new poetic means. In the
digital age, poets face growing competition that arises from the expansion of the literary
community and the multiple texts which require their attention and judgment. I believe
that this article offers such a map, which can continue to evolve as new technologies shift
from invention to routine. Furthermore, I hope that this map can shed light on additional
meeting points between art and technology.
340 International Journal of Cultural Studies 24(2)

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

References
Aristotle (1974) Poetics. Salt Lake City, UT: Project Gutenberg eBook
Bar-Ilan J and Groisman N (2003) Modern Hebrew literature on the web: A content analysis.
Online Information Review 27(2): 77–86.
Baym NK (2018) Playing to the Crowd: Musicians, Audiences, and the Intimate Work of
Connection. New York: New York University Press.
Bolter JD (1991) Beyond word processing: The computer as a new writing space. Language and
Communication 9(2/3): 129–142.
Bolter JD (2001) Writing Space. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Cayley J (1998) Of programmatology. Mute 11(72): 13–17.
Cohen A (2013) Hello Google. Helicon, The New Voice 99: 13 (in Hebrew).
Danet B (2001) Cyberpl@y: Communicating Online. Oxford: Berg.
De Mann P (1979) Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and
Proust. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Deuze M (2007) Media Work. Cambridge: Polity.
Flores L (2014) DHTML dances: The making of an e-poet. Przegląd Kulturoznawczy 20(2):
163–177.
Geldman M (2013) Becoming One. Tel Aviv: Keshev Publishing House (in Hebrew).
Glazier LG (2002) Digital Poetics: The Making of E-poetries. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama
Press.
Goldsmith K (2008) Conceptual poetics. Poetry Foundation. Available at: https://www.poetry-
foundation.org/harriet/2008/06/conceptual-poetics-kenneth-goldsmithv (accessed 28 October
2018).
Goldsmith K (2011) Why conceptual writing? Why now? In: Dworkin C and Goldsmith K (eds)
Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age. New York: Columbia University
Press, pp. xvii–xxii.
Gumbrecht HU (2004) Production of Presence. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Gurevitch Z (2008) Double Click. Tel Aviv: Am Oved Publishers (in Hebrew).
Hadas E (2013) The Space Bar. Tel Aviv: Maayan Publishing House (in Hebrew).
Hadas E (2014) Code. Haifa: Pardes Publishing House (in Hebrew).
Haimovich G (2010) Lint Season. Haifa: Pardes Publishing House (in Hebrew).
Hakimi T (2014) Mañana Trabajaremos. Tel Aviv: Tangier Publishing House (in Hebrew).
Hamidi F and Baljko M (2012) Using social media for multicultural creative collaboration. In:
Vatrapu R, Evers B, Akhilesh KB, Nardi B and Maznevski M (eds) Proceedings of the 4th
International Conference on Intercultural Collaboration, Bengaluru, India, 21–23 March
2012. New York: ACM, pp. 39–46.
Hayles K (2006) The time of digital poetry: From object to event. In: Morris A and Swiss T (eds),
New Media Poetics: Context, Technotext, and Theories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp.
181–209.
Hockx M (2005) Links with the past: Mainland China’s online literary communities and their
antecedents. Journal of Contemporary China 13(38): 105–127.
Huizinga J (1955) Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-element in Culture. Boston, MA: Beacon
Press.
Katz Y and Shifman L (2017) Making sense? The structure and meanings of digital memetic non-
sense. Information, Communication & Society 20(6): 825–842.
Shakargy 341

Lichtash T (2007) Lorem Ipsum. Privately published.

López DR (2012) Poetics of crisis or crisis of poetics in digital reading/writing? The case of
Spanish digital literature. Literary and Linguistic Computing 27(3): 305–320.
Markham AN (2004) Internet communication as a tool for qualitative research. Qualitative
Research: Theory, Method and Practice 2: 95–124.
Meiri G (2010) An introduction to nano-poetics. Poetry International Website. Available at:
https://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/cou_article/item/15836/An-Introduction-to-
Nano-poetics/en (accessed 26 October 2018).
Morris A (2006) New media poetics: As we may think/how to write. In: Morris A and Swiss T
(eds, New Media Poetics: Context, Technotext, and Theories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
pp. 1–46.
Moxley DP, Tatum D and Washington OG (2011) A voice in the wilderness: The reflexivity of a
homeless poet. ALAR: Action Learning and Action Research Journal 17(1): 39.
Neiger M and Abdullayev N (2011) The publishing experience: Examination of manuscript pub-
lishing process. Kesher 41: 54–64.
Oz D (2013) Remnants of Love: A Poem. Ra’anana: Even Hoshen private press (in Hebrew).
Parish N (2008) From book to page to screen: Poetry and new media. Yale French Studies 114:51–66.
Perloff M (2005) Moving information on Kenneth Goldsmith’s The Weather. Marjorie Perloff –
Modern and Postmodern Poetry and Poetics. Available at: www.marjorieperloff.com/essays/
goldsmith-weather (accessed 20 October 2018).
Perloff M (2006) Screening the page/paging the screen: Digital poetics and the differential text.
In: Morris A and Swiss T (eds) New Media Poetics: Context, Technotext, and Theories.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 62–143.
Perloff M (2010) Unoriginal Genius. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Shifman L (2007) Humor in the age of digital reproduction: Continuity and change in internet-
based comic texts. International Journal of Communication 1(1): 23.
Shifman L (2014) Memes in Digital Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Shmeiss AA (2013) A Basket of Silent Languages. Jaffa: Mitaan Publishing House (in Hebrew).
Siegert B (2008) Cacography or communication? Cultural techniques in German media studies.
Grey Room 29: 26–47.
Starks H and Trinidad SB (2007) Choose your method: A comparison of phenomenology, dis-
course analysis, and grounded theory. Qualitative Health Research 17(10): 1372–1380.
Stein G (2010) Narration: Four Lectures. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Strauss A and Corbin J (1998) Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for
Developing Grounded Theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Webster JG and Lin SF (2002) The internet audience: Web use as mass behavior. Journal of
Broadcasting & Electronic Media 46(1): 1–12.

Author biography
Noa Shakargy is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her dissertation, titled The Mediatization of Literature in the
Age of Media, focuses on the changes in the field of literature caused by the development of the
digital era.