Readers discuss the Internet's influence on literary form.

Slate's weeklong symposium on the Novel 2.0, in which Walter Kirn and Gary Shteyngart speculate on the fate and evolution of the novel in the age of the Internet, is all the more fitting for being hosted on an online-only publication that itself embodies the promise and paperless appeal of delivering journalism and culture via an electronic medium.

Taking an almost Enlightenment view of the universal human subject, twifferTheGnu is of the conviction that the more things change, the more they stay the same:

fashion, technology, language, customs all fall in and out of common use. yet, the concerns of humans, the desires, needs, hopes remain remarkably consistent. so what has changed? not the world, but the means of interacting with it.

does this mean the end of the novel? of course not. if there is one constant of human nature, it is our love of discussing ourselves. even if we never really change. the novel will continue, and will, like other aspects of the human world, undergo superficial changes to reflect the superficial changes in society. but the core will remain untouched. because for all our changes, people never do change, do they?

DonJindra makes a helpful distinction: "Changing communication does change the world. It all started with the printing press. No, we don't change human nature, but that's not 'the world.' How we live in the world certainly has changed, and will continue to change dramatically." As proof, baltimore-aureole lists the top 10 ways the Internet has changed the world, everything from "record stores going out of business" to declining worker productivity.

Identifying as a 23 year-old who is "old enough to treasure analog and young enough to pass through most digital applications without blinking an eye," DeliciousSandwich presents this forecast:

while it's true that a story does not change whether composed on parchment or computer screen, audience capacity is changing. Technology has gauranteed this; we consume in fits and starts, bite-sized downloads, nuggets of culture never too large as to overwhelm our attention spans. If there is a future for the novel, it might come in serialized form (as Walter Kirn has already demonstrated here in Slate, not to mention Stephen King and a slew of lesser-knowns all over the web). And of course Dickens was serialized for much of his career. But I'm not convinced readers have the patience to dive into James Joyce in downloadable form. There will always be novels, I think, but soon we may view them as the exception instead of the rule - like a director putting aside his HD camera to play around with 16mm, just like the good old days.

Not so fast, chimes inTidewaterJoe: "The novel will not die, not in the time in which I have still to live, say 20 or 30 years … " In his view, the practicality of ink on paper for certain leisurely or scholarly purposes (such as reading on the beach and highlighting) will always trump the computer.

The nature of the electronic medium itself poses certain challenges to any sustained discourse or literary enterprise on the Internet, arguesaugust:

Being online truncates my attention span, and I just can't follow long forms without drifting off to some other link. This post is probably too long, to say nothing of a novel. So let's hold off on the proclamation of novel 2.0. The internet hasn't even really met its Cervantes, to say nothing of its Tolstoy, Proust, or Faulkner.

But in terms of content, the play of identity, the necessarily pithy modes of expression, the desire to plug in and to unplug: all that seems like fodder for this generation of novelists.

We will end with annelliott9, whose observations as a high-school English teacher give us reason for optimism: