Traffic Victory and the Challenges to Literary Dignity of Online Novels in the Postmodern Society

Abstract

In the postmodern media-platform structure, online novels and commercial novels, as the frontier forms of the "cultural industry", have indeed expanded the accessibility of entertainment and expressive opportunities for underprivileged groups through digital distribution and low entry barriers. However, the same platform logic has also completely commercialized, metricized, and traffic-oriented the creation process, trampling on the core of "literature" as an expression of aesthetics, ethics, and cognition. By tracing the origin and development of online novels, this paper points out their positive significance in lowering the threshold of cultural consumption and enriching the entertainment supply for underprivileged groups. On this basis, it criticizes the realities of online novels under platform governance and commercial logic: being fully metricized, the creation process becoming "assembly-line-style", the text quality being extremely disconnected from real life experience, and the evaluation system being hijacked by clicks, rewards, and fan mobilization. The phrase "this is a work loved by the public" has become a tool to suppress refined aesthetics and the depiction of complex realities. The so-called "entertainment equality" has gradually evolved into "entertainment hegemony", replacing the truth-seeking and formal exploration of literature with commodity logic. It should be noted that the criticism in this paper targets the systematic structure rather than individual audiences, and defends the dignity of literature and the diverse ecosystem by questioning the structure itself.