Inside Authorship

This week's blog post is in response to three articles. They are The Death of the Author by Roland Barthes, Models of Authorship in New Media by Manovich and Michel Foucalt's piece on the function of the author.

They were all very short HTML based pieces (which I appreciate at this time of year) but they were very straight forward and got their points across wonderfully (even if Manovich's writing felt a little unfocused).

Barthes' piece was rather unusual for it's length. I felt like I was reading the CliffNotes for a much larger piece of literature I was supposed to have read all the way through for this class, but since that wasn't the case here, I appreciate the brevity of this article.

Still, Barthes and Foucault had the most interesting takes on this subject. The concept of "authorship" is something fresh and clever to me in this context as I haven't read or heard of it being bought up in a digital media context until today.

It is a very relevant and important topic for this class and I'm glad it was bought up. While Barthes and Foucault's articles were written quite some time ago, they can be applied to today's world much more easily. Barthes and Foucault viewed authorship mostly as a deep philosophical concept and applied it to the medium of books and literature. This can be better applied to the internet and social media. Manovich briefly touched on this, but didn't quite get there as he was more interested in talking about how it applied to writing software.

Both articles claim that some insight into the author's identity is key to deciphering their text so, in essence, if one were to "remove" the author form said text then figuring out its meaning would be virtually impossible. It is true that whatever the medium you write in, your writing stays with you forever. At the same time, it belongs to the public and whatever you write will be associated with your identity forever not just as an author but as a human being. Your writing both consciously and subconsciously reflects who you are inside.

This especially holds true for the the internet and especially social media. You can remain as anonymous as you want to online, but what you write is attached to an identity and said identity is forever bound to you as a person. Social media is different because your putting your real identity there and whatever you write and produce is associated with you personally and will stay with you forever as the internet becomes less tangible and more consuming of our lives and memories. Books are one thing, they are in print which is a tangible medium. Still, the stories within become part of our culture and consciousness. The internet is also different because if you're not constructing a work of fiction, then you must be consciously posting what you yourself are doing or thinking at any given moment in real time.

I guess what I'm really trying to say here is no matter where you're writing, be careful and responsible of what you write because you don't know how wide your audience reach could get.

That's it for this week. For now, I leave you with this link to my new website where I've made some major design changes. See you next week!