I find this, as well as the whole concept of a simple, to be much more precise a way of defining electronic literature through its own nature and not through the concept of literary arts and its translations. As many electronic literature artists are not necessarily good traditional writers, it seems that the definition of the field should focus more on the technological underpinnings of the practices rather than their relations to literary arts. This depiction of artists exploiting and pushing the envelope of text/algorithm interaction captures this aspect quite well.

The rise of this term is very interesting. The term "digital poetry" almost seems like a subset of practices that electronic literature describes and yet its popularity is reaching the same levels. Do people feel that these are two different fields or just two different ways of describing similar practices?

I wonder if this distinction is changing as there are more and more US schools also starting to teach an research the field of digital humanities where digital means not only the digitised works but also born-digital materials (as notes also on Wikipedia)

This note, to me, opens up a particularly complex issue of defining electronic literature. With some bordering fields fairly close to the practices of electronic literature, what is the essential thing that defines electronic literature? Is it the act of reading that is essential in literary art and should we, then, leave out works that are meant more to be thought about than read, like texts that are just too long for any human to ever finish reading?

On another note, does this act of reading imply that there must be a human as the audience of the work of electronic literature?