Why Continue Writing Poetry in a Digital World?

Publié le 29 septembre 202629 septembre 2026 Publié dans Understanding Today's Culture (EN)Étiqueté artistic creation, cultural chronicle, Digital Culture, Digital Poetry, digital world, global networked culture, Human Experience, human traces, humanist digital art, Instapoetry, poetry4 commentaires

We Participate in the Evolution of the Digital World

Digital artwork by Gilles Vallée depicting a bicycle beside a staircase in a composition of cyan, purple and yellow tones.

Read this article in French:
Pourquoi continuer d’écrire de la poésie dans un monde numérique ?

An Everyday Scene

You go online.
You type into a search engine:
“poetry on the Web”

The answer comes back:
“Poetry on the Web transforms traditional writing into an interactive, visual and auditory experience accessible everywhere.”

That’s true. Digital technology is transforming the ways we write, publish and read poetry. Instapoetry, which emerged with social media, is one example.

But the movement also goes in the other direction.

Every poem we write and publish adds a few words to this immense digital space. Just a few words, but words that carry an image, an emotion, a human experience, a way of looking at the world.

We do more than simply inhabit the digital world. Through what we choose to publish there, we also participate in its evolution.

A single poem may seem tiny in the vastness of the Web, but we should not think only at the scale of one poem. Whether published in a book or on the Web, every poem joins other human traces that, together, participate in the evolution of global culture.

When a poem is published on the Web, it also enters this space of circulation that we build every day.

We constantly use words to communicate, search or explain. Poetry reminds us that words can also make us imagine, feel and see differently. Writing poetry means exploring this other possibility of language. A few words can be enough to evoke a mental image, an emotion, a memory or a question.

That is also why it matters to keep writing poetry and putting it into circulation. The digital world should not become merely a useful space for finding information, working, calculating or communicating. It should also carry the emotional, intuitive and imaginative dimensions of human experience.

Continuing to publish poetry there is one way of helping to ensure this human presence within the network.

The digital world will continue to evolve. What we choose to write and put into circulation will also help determine what it becomes. Poetry can continue to be part of it.

We have the opportunity to leave poetic traces in this algorithmic world, so let’s do it.

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This text is part of the Understanding Today’s Culture series, a chronicle of our global networked culture.

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The More Digital the World Becomes, the More Important the Human Becomes

Publié le 25 septembre 202629 septembre 2026 Publié dans Understanding Today's Culture (EN)Étiqueté algorithmic systems, Art and Technology, Artificial intelligence, artistic creation, cultural chronicle, cultural mediation, Digital Culture, digital world, Human Experience, human traces, humanist digital art6 commentaires

Sculpture depicting a human figure integrated into a digital composition with blue, grey, and red textures.

Read this article in French:
Plus le monde devient numérique, plus l’humain devient important

An Everyday Scene

You go online.
You search the Web for an image of a man working on a sculpture.
Among the results, an old photograph appears showing a sculptor in his studio.
You see him working with the material.
This moment actually happened.

Then you ask an artificial intelligence to generate an image of a man working on a sculpture.
A few seconds later, another image appears.
It is convincing.
The gesture looks real.
So does the dust.

Yet something has changed.
In the first image, this moment was lived.
In the second, this moment was simulated.

In the first photograph, a human being was there. He touched the material and engaged in an act of creation. The photograph preserves a trace of that moment.

What we are looking at, then, is not simply an image of a man at work. Something of his experience reaches us.

Human beings have always passed their experiences on to one another in this way. Through stories, objects, works of art, letters, photographs, or films, we discover what others have seen, felt, imagined, or lived.

The digital world does not make these traces disappear. On the contrary, it can preserve them, circulate them, and allow us to encounter them.

But a new cultural and artistic environment is taking shape. Algorithmic systems can also produce images, texts, or music that seem to carry the trace of a human experience without a human being having lived what they represent.

In this environment, being anchored in human experience takes on particular importance.

Behind a photograph, a story, a work of art, or a testimony, we can encounter the experience of another human being. Through the trace they have left behind, something of that experience can travel through time, circulate in the digital world, and reach us.

Representations produced by algorithmic systems are not necessarily anchored in human experience in this way. They can move us, surprise us, or lead us to imagine an experience without necessarily being the trace of a real human experience.

The more digital the world becomes, the more important the human becomes.

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This text is part of the Understanding Today’s Culture series, a chronicle of our global networked culture.

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