Genre categorization is a capitalist (rather than artistic) thing, a symptom of marketing and major-chain bookshelf placement.
Having a voice unlike another means you've "found yourself" as a writer.
I don't have a philosophy. I have an instinct. I accept stuff that I like.
The Internet is perfect for delivering large blocks of text to people throughout the world for free. That's a plus. The downside is the ADD, the Internet-addled Attention Deficit Disorder.
Artists used to argue about art for art's sake versus social realism etc, and now it's like the most dominate argument is related to "art for the market's sake." It's a necessity, somewhat, for some people.
The Web ultimately is a medium used by real offline people, and as such, it'll probably be whatever we are.
There's a ton of good art and music and writing out there offline among a ton of trash, and the same goes with what's online.
If you want to change things in the USA it's best not to spend all your time writing but to take action against the ol' sea of troubles.
Online writing is supplementary, complementary, another part of the whole, something that's only as important as one's investment in it.
I'm an only child and an American and am wholly in favor of uniqueness of voice in everything, especially music and writing.
The problem with the term "The New Fiction" is that the fiction will inevitably be old. The same could have been said about the work of any generation of writers.
Considering that "literary fiction" is a sub-genre that's not quite the same as "literature," either, it follows that the short, semi-humorous bits posted online for all to see are something absolutely other, uniquely themselves compared to canonical short stories, for example, and so it'd probably be best to call it something other than "online lit" since I honestly think very little of it can compare to so-called "literature."
I really wouldn't call a lot of what's online "literature" since that word, to me, refers to a sub-genre of writing that belongs to the heavy-hitters, the canonical writers, Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Dostoevsky, Kafka, and even Toni Morrison, George Saunders, Thomas Bernhard, Sebald, Borges, DFW, e.g.
America's all about the various voices, right? When we all speak with a common voice we verge on fascism, which is militaristic, and fundamentally anti-American.
