The shift from literature to electronic literature cannot be separated from parallel shifts in the field of arts and humanities (from literary to cultural studies, from text culture to visual culture. Does e-literature undermine the bastions of traditional humanist culture? Do they need to incorporate electronic literature in their curriculum? If traditional humanist culture is largely seen as literature, then the literary” consists of literature plus artworks that interrogate that contexts, histories, and productions of literature. Is it new forms into an old paradigm or discipline?

The objects of cultural studies are predominantly text. Maybe not literary texts in a conventional sense, but predominantly text. If electronic literature challenges the assumption that things should be text, then what is text as we live through the declining supremacy of print culture? Blogging would be text---and so a part of e-literature would it not?

In Electronic Literature: What is it? N. Katherine Hayles says that:

the place of writing is again in turmoil, roiled now not by the invention of print books but the emergence of electronic literature. Just as the history of print literature is deeply bound up with the evolution of book technology as it built on wave after wave of technical innovations, so the history of electronic literature is entwined with the evolution of digital computers.... Is electronic literature really literature at all? Will the dissemination mechanisms of the Internet and World Wide Web, by opening publication to everyone, result in a flood of worthless drivel? Is literary quality possible in digital media, or is electronic literature demonstrably inferior to the print canon? What large-scale social and cultural changes are bound up with the spread of digital culture, and what do they portend for the future of writing?

Hayes goes on to say that:

because electronic literature is normally created and performed within a context of networked and programmable media, it is also informed by the powerhouses of contemporary culture, particularly computer games, films, animations, digital arts, graphic design, and electronic visual culture. In this sense electronic literature is a "hopeful monster" (as geneticists call adaptive mutations) composed of parts taken from diverse traditions that may not always fit neatly together. Hybrid by nature, it comprises a trading zone ....in which different vocabularies, expertises and expectations come together to see what might come from their intercourse. .... Electronic literature tests the boundaries of the literary and challenges us to re-think our assumptions of what literature can do and be.