The Internet is nothing less than a medium for the indiscriminate and global dissemination of information if we take information in its cybernetic sense as bits of data - any data. As such, it is also a massive, amorphous, rhizomic collection of substantiated facts, guesswork, fantasy, madness, debate, criminal energy, big business, stupidity, brilliance, all in all a seemingly limitless multiplication of voices, all clamouring to be heard. It is a medium which proliferates stories, narratives, fictions, in ways which are both new and familiar. It is as a generator of fictions that the Internet seems to be just waiting to be explored by the disciplines of literary, cultural and linguistic studies: Fan-fiction, slash and straight; scam baiting; fan sites; ‘wild’ or ‘rogue’ interpretive universes; gossip, theories, musings, opinions. As a singularly unstructured - and hence as yet uncanonizable - body of texts, the stories told on the Internet have a distinct element of ‘grass-roots’ fictionalization and so offer an unprecedented opportunity to access, hear and investigate the stories and fantasies woven by non-professional writers alongside their more formally recognized colleagues. As a medium which is beginning to investigate itself by means of various meta-debates within the vast community of Internet fictionalizers, it is also a location where emergent phenomena may be debated in their process of being generated. This collection seeks to explore this for the most part uncharted territory in creative, innovative, theory-savvy ways using the manifold fictions the Internet generates. It brings together a wide variety of expertise from the fields of linguistic, literary, media and cultural studies. All contributors bring to the collection their individual voices and approaches which speak from various positions of involvedness or critique to provide searching and passionate discussions of the issues involved in Internet Fictions.
