Web

“A comprehensive critical guide to the web would be possible only if the critic had seen all the existing websites, which is a qualification nobody sane can any longer possess. Probably there were only a few weeks, in at the birth of the new form, when a comprehensive critical guide was even remotely possible. But to provide a consistent critical guide — steady in its principles although necessarily incomplete — is surely a possible aim. Among the sites he visits, for whatever purpose, the critic is bound to decide that some are more worthwhile than most. In judging what is worthwhile, he employs his viewpoint. The best websites are already doing the same. Unlike a blog, which is mainly mere opinion, and unlike most websites, which are mainly information, a substantial website is presenting a view of reality. To assess various views of reality, and say how he thinks they accord with the real reality — with liberal realism — is the work of the critic. The process might be endlessly complicated but the justification is simple and immediate: this is the work that liberal realism, and only liberal realism, does. This is the impulse that defines liberal realism. There are no illiberal versions of it. What the web has provided is a whole new field of study that threatens to engulf all the others in its magnitude, but essentially this new field of study merely arranges and accelerates the fields of study that were already there. Nobody yet has been born into the web. We come to it from the outside, and our knowledge of where we came from determines where and how we search. Still too new to it all to have become blasé, I continue to be bowled over at what I find on the end of a single click. The first links at the left of this paragraph provide a small start to what could become a long list, if only I get time.”