Blogging is a practice, which mainly consists of linking and referencing other blogs or sites. At least, it is a practice that I widely use. After reading Lorelle’s post on copyright and translation, I thought about the role of authorship in the blogosphere and in the web in general. The term of authorship often connotes the individualization of ideas, literature, philosophy and science. The role of the author is namely, very tightly connected with his/her work. By that I mean, that in order to fully comprehend the meanings hidden in the article or book or post we desire to know who, when, why and under which circumstances created the piece. If I were to write a post about free software, copyleft rights and the open source movement, you would like to know my background. Do I use Windows or Linux, what are my studies, am I a programmer or a user? Such information could define the post itself. But in some rare occasions the work follows its own course.
The role of the author
Michel Foucault suggests, that the characteristic of the author, which accompanies the work, is in such cases her absence. But Foucault carries on talking about the role of an author, who goes beyond her work, who also succeeds – always through his/her work - in producing an opportunity for discussion and creation. Such authors produce an unlimited room for development and improvement.
One could think of their works as seeds, which other authors have the chance to take, change them at will and plant them as they wish to create new cognition. In such a case, the author is seen as a collector of information and knowledge. His/Her role is to gather and process data – and eventually add new content to the information pool. (as V. Flusser suggests)
New type of authorship
The World Wide Web and its hyperlinked structure has enabled this type of authorship in a literal way. From the first virtual communities to the blogging practices of today, users serve as information gatherers for others. During the 1980s, users met in Usenet newsgroups and today in weblogs and wikis to aggregate information.The first contemporary example of this new form of authorship that comes to my mind is wikis. Tens of millions of people visit Wikipedia and other wiki sites every day. They read, add and transform data in collectively created articles. On wikis, no person considers herself the author of an entry, since authorship is in a way senseless; wikis are collaboratively written works. It is actually considered ‘unwiki’? to claim authorship- or even primary authorship - of an article. I tried to understand authorship under the blogging perspective. Yes of course authorship in weblogs is important, who writes what makes a big difference and is fundamental of the structure of the blogosphere. But it is still in the hands of the reader to collect all the pieces of information from comments, forums and linked blog articles about a specific topic in order to get the whole view of the subject. What I’m saying is that a subject is objectively covered, only when someone collects all the information about it; and in the end, readers are the ones, who gather the information. We are therefore returning to a thought expressed in the late 1960s by Roland Barthes, that “the unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination.” The reader is the one who has the overview of all citations a writing consists of.
Conclusion
We are nowadays witnessing a new form of authorship, which signalizes participation and collective knowledge. The social web gives people the opportunity to share, collaborate, criticize and create a commons of ideas. The role of the individual is important to contribute in this commons but not to lead it. This bottom-up structure that the social web enables, draws the attention of the public, which wants to be a part of the productive process; and hypertext enables interactivity and in a way lifts the boundaries between reader and author.
The notion of the author - of the sole person getting credit for a work - is quite new. In the middle ages someone who copied a text, without adding anything new was considered a scriptor; someone who used works of others was a compilator; author was the one who used other works only to verify his own.
I’m not advocating for copycats or translated versions of a text. On the contrary,
- I believe that copycats, like the farmers of the example above, collect information and in a way or another add something (maybe something very little) to the original source.
- I have complete trust in the users constituting the social web, to expose any dishonest intentions.
- I find the web so intriguing exactly because there is no control of the data running in its streams. I prefer it, when people use my work without giving me any credit, than have a central control, choosing who posts what, when.
For this document I used (and draw inspiration) by the works of: Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Martha Woodmansee, Richard Stallman. I hear Jay David Bolter’s book: Writing Space is thematizing this subject. I will return with a complementary post, after reading it. For more accurate information, questions or whatever feel free to contact me.
