Cyberspace, Heritage Conservation and Poets' Place in Taiwan

The advent of computers, digital data, Internet and cyberspace, which allows information to be accessed and diffused with ease, has posed a serious threat, as many people believe, to a traditional carrier of knowledge and an important constituent of cultural heritage—published books on paper. In Taiwan, the decline in bookstore sales and the closing down of more and more traditional bookstores in recent years have been greeted with alarm. Many people worry that this phenomenon signifies a drop in reading population, which means a weakening of cultural power. This paper reconsiders this seemingly alarming phenomenon by reviewing literature production and consumption in Taiwan's market. Theory-wise, it takes Greek philosopher's debate over the place of poets—Plato's denouncement of poets in The Republic, and Aristotle's defense of poets in Poetics, as a point of departure to scrutinize the role of poetic productions from ancient times to modern era. It analyzes how realistic considerations related to politics and business profits could seemingly marginalize poetic productions. Nevertheless, it proposes that cumbersome poetic works printed on paper will not be obsolete in the immediate future as long as people who have grown up reading books have not extinct. Moreover, it makes an analogy between the present phenomenon under discussion and the serious threat to traditional theaters posed by movies, which never wipe the former out. Case-wise, the paper discusses three contemporary Taiwanese authors, Giddens Ke, Chiou-yuan Lu and Lisa Liu, whose fame was established in the Internet before their books were published. The paper attempts to demonstrate that their popularity in cyberspace led to the publication of their books, which sold well in the market. It argues that cyberspace may not be a terminator of physical books when it comes to poetic productions. Readers and lovers of fictions are being drawn back to the book market where their favorite authors in cyberspace have published. Therefore, even though the medium may change from paper to digitalized formats or vice versa, poets still have a place in Taiwan. Poetic productions, as cultural items constituting a corpus of cultural heritage, may transform into digitalized formats, but their nature or essence would continue beyond the limitations of formats, just as poetic productions can transcend the limitation of reality to create fictive worlds that give pleasure to their readers.