The Internet: The End of "The End"?

Paul Valéry (image source goodreads.com)

The French poet and critic Paul Valéry once said, "Poems are never finished, only abandoned." Reading andthinking about Dr. Burton's concept of the spiral and the idea of iterative social creation this week brought that quote to my mind again, along with the question: Is the internet the end of "finished products"?


Dr. Burton pointed out in the lecture this week that perhaps one of the biggest dividing lines between print and digital culture is that print is by necessity finished product gone through several reviewers and editors before it's put out into wide distribution, while the internet is instant wide distribution of whatever people want.

At the same time, Dr. Burton encouraged us to put out ideas through blogging that we might not otherwise put out for the world to see to allow others to help us in the creative process so we can make something better than we'd make on our own. This is certainly the process the digital age has taken on in many ways. News stories on the internet often end in something like "We will continue to update this story as details come out." These stories are then edited several times over days or weeks before they're left alone not because they're finished as much because there are other stories to write at that point. In video games, it is becoming increasingly popular to open up development to beta and even alpha testing as the developers continue to work on the game before it's official "release." Steam, the most popular online game store and platform for PC games, now has a section of the store dedicated to these "early access" games. Even after games are released, they are often updated through downloaded patches, which, again, only really end when people stop playing the game, not when the game's "finished."