In my essay in the new issue of Creative Nonfiction I try to figure out what the difference is between publishing online and offline, and also just what my own hang-ups about such things are. (I also get into the origins of the Internet, my computer-savant brother, and some other things.) Here’s the start:

1997—a year situated at the beginning of the dot-com bubble and fewer than four years after the Web became free for everyone to use. It was a time when desktop computers were cheaper than laptops, cell phones were getting smaller rather than bigger, and Internet traffic was just .02 percent of what it is today. In February of that year, The Atlantic Monthly published an interview with novelist and Mississippi Review editor Frederick Barthelme titled “The Web is a Gun.” In it, Rick famously described the Internet as “all potential” and made a strong and, at the time, fairly novel case that it would be “the most powerful agent of change since the printing press.” Two years before the interview, in 1995, Rick had begun publishing Mississippi Review Online, arguably the first literary magazine online—right at the beginning of our virtual lives.

Read the rest—and great stuff from Nathaniel Brodie, B.J. Hollars, and others, as well as Lee Gutkind on the D’Agata/Daisey dust up (you knew it was coming)—in CNF 44.