All the World's a Page: Towards a Definition of 'Writer' in an Age of Opportunity (original) (raw)

Sound Writing: Reclaiming Authorship in the Digital Age

JoSch, 2018

In 2009, literacy scholars Denis G. Pelli and Charles Bigelow made the startling claim that "nearly universal literacy is a defining characteristic of today's modern civilization; nearly universal authorship will shape tomorrow's." Thanks to the advent of blogs and social media, many people are now authoring texts reaching audiences of 100 people or more (Pelli and Bigelow's defining criterion for authorship). Yet, despite the democratizing implications of Pelli and Bigelow's widely circulated claim, the influence of most digital age authors remains slight relative to the influence of those who utilize traditional publishing processes. This disparity is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the publishing of reference books, which remain largely the province of for-profit publishers and exude a cachet and influence qualitatively distinct from content published by social media authors (Facebook posts, Twitter tweets, etc.). Reference books for writing-dictionaries, writing handbooks, grammar handbooks-are often marketed, and subsequently received as prescriptive manuals, with rules handed down on high for writers meekly to learn and follow. Though some social media authors certainly have significant influence, their credibility pales in comparison to that of "the dictionary." The credibility of these books is in inverse relationship to the prominence of the authors. Unlike social media authorship, which is dependent on individual authors' social identities, modern reference publishing practices obscure authorship-to the extent that reading publics forget, for instance, that Webster's Dictionary began as the cultural work of Noah Webster, an eccentric American nationalist in favor of remaking English, or that Ludwig Reiner's Stilfibel builds on material acquired through the questionable wartime use of Jewish author Eduard Engel's work. 1 The seeming authorlessness of reference guides suggests that the authors' advice on writing is universal, rather than historically specific. This erasure of authorial presence ironically disservices new writers, who may perceive the guides' esoteric rules as barriers to rather than avenues for their successful integration within an academic community. In this essay, we reflect on how our experiences of creating Sound Writing, a borndigital writing reference guide, enabled us to interrupt modern print reference publishing practices; to reclaim the authority and ownership so often passed off to others in a commercial publication process; and-to the benefit of ourselves as writers and our audience as readers-to refigure the notion of "correctness" itself.

Negotiating tensions around new forms of academic writing

Discourse, Context and Media (2018), 2018

Almost every aspect of an academic’s role involves specialised forms of writing, and the range of digital platforms used to produce this has increased. Core genres such as the journal article and monograph remain central, but the ways they are now commonly produced via file-sharing software and online submission systems are changing them. Digital media also allows academics to stay up to date with their field, connect with others, and share research with wider audiences. Furthermore, academics are increasingly expected to maintain online identities via academic networking sites, and to create and disseminate knowledge via hybrid genres such as tweets and blogs. However, these platforms also represent a potential threat to academics’ values and sense of identity. This paper reports on an [name of funder] research project investigating the writing practices of academics across different disciplines at three English universities. Through academics’ accounts of their experience with and feelings about the role of digital media in their professional writing, this paper explores the factors that complicate their engagement with new genres of writing. The findings reveal a tension between the values of social media, which see knowledge as user-generated and decentralised, and the forms of knowledge creation that are rewarded in academia.

Blogs and the crisis of authorship

The uptake of blogs proves that reports of the death of the author are greatly exaggerated. The Author is alive and well, and has a blog. In the speculative era of cyberculture criticism in the early 1990s, many authors claimed electronic text would destabilise the institution of authorship (Poster 2001; Landow 1994; Bolter 2001). They argued changes of material form of writing would decrease the power of the author. They connected this claim with critics such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault who had questioned conventional assumptions about authorship, and speculated on the possibilities of texts without authors. While the claims of these electronic writing advocates were contested theoretically (Grusin 1994), the popularity of blogs empirically demonstrates the persistence of authorship, and how progress often works backwards. Authorship is so familiar it’s almost invisible, and so flexible it cannot be defined. Certain elements of a text attribute it to a source: an author’s name on the book cover, a newspaper by-line, or the author information in a blog. The Author emerged in the West alongside a range of economic, technological, social, political and legal changes associated with the rise of individualism, capitalism, rationalism, democracy and rule of law. Authorship functions as a boundary abstraction that connects each of these discourses. It gives authors the legal protection of copyright, economic connections with the printing and publishing industries and provides the key field to locate books on the shelves of booksellers and libraries. In silent reading, it provides a persona for the reader to imagines, completing a text’s meaning. Canons of authors provide symbolic figures whose names become shorthand for concepts and stories. The convention of reading a text with reference to its author is ingrained, even if this institution is only 500 years old. Blogs have succeeded because they are less innovative than other online forms. Far from dissolving authorship, blogs perpetuate, coexist with, and transform it. Authorship re-emerges in proportion to the distance that a text moves from its context. Specific features of blogs allow them to invoke Foucault’s author-function more effectively than static personal home pages: the inverted narrative structure of the archive, the consistent voice, the time stamp that positions posts in a reference to a temporality shared with readers. However, the practices associated with blogs also do transform authorship. The reader’s capacity to give feedback through comments compensates for the conversational mode of writing. Many blogs’s authority comes from positions outside institutions. Blogs gravitated towards two discourses that reflect the conventional split between public and private domains: the political polemic blog, and the confessional diary. Media events that brought certain blogs into the public sphere in 2003 and 2004 followed standard scripts for each side of this split. The role of political blogs in discrediting Dan Rather’s report on Bush’s war record was generally celebrated as evidence that blogs were legitimate players in the public domain. On the other hand, the most high profile personal diaries were those that presented narratives of transgressive sexuality: Muzimei in China, the London Callgirl in the UK, and Washingtonienne in the US. By contrast with the political bloggers, these authors who brought the private sphere to the public were subject to a moralistic collective tribunal.

Forewarned is forearmed: The brave new world of (Creative) Writing online

Online Writing courses, including Creative Writing programs, have been delivered in Australia for more than a decade. While most providers of online writing programs offer units in either a flexible or blended transmission model or with a choice of online or face-to-face (F2F) modality, there is pressure on universities to increase the proportion of programs delivered using e-learning. With this trend in mind, I investigate some of the germinal theoretical and pedagogical ideas impacting on the online delivery of Writing in a Master of Arts program taught at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. These concepts include the social constructivist notions of community of practice and imagined community. In narrating my story of developing and teaching units for online delivery, I draw on my empirical studies (2009, 2010) for narratives from tutors and students. Here, their voices become part of my narrative enquiry: their insights inform the story of what I learned from engaging in teaching and learning (Creative) Writing online. I consider the post-structural notion that writers’ identities are motivated by desire, in flux and sites of struggle. This applies to all people enrolling in writers’ programs, whether online or F2F. They are seeking increased agency in their desires to be and become more accomplished writers. It is as important for an online delivery to realise this as a F2F one. I also issue a challenge for (Creative) Writing programs to consider more deeply the pedagogical potential of online workshopping while acknowledging it can only be an emulation of F2F environments. I conclude that for a creative discipline like Writing, course designers and educators need to look beyond schematic social constructivist models of learning where learners experience linear trajectories to one which allow narratives of being and becoming that more fully understand the investment of people enrolling in Writing programs.

The Work of Writing in the Age of Its Digital Reproducibility

Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, 2011

Just as a child who has learned to grasp stretches out its hand for the moon as it would for a ball, so humanity, in all its efforts at innervation, sets its sights as much on currently utopian goals as on goals within reach. Because... technology aims at liberating human beings from drudgery, the individual suddenly sees his scope for play, his field of action, immeasurably expanded. He does not yet know his way around this space. But already he registers his demands on it.(Benjamin, 1936/2008, p. 242)

Caught in/on the Web: To publish without perishing in the Digital Age

2000

Abstract Publishing online is an increasingly prevalent means for scholars to test their ideas. But what of its challenges? Focusing on an ill-fated Web site dedicated to the polemic French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and on a proposed hypertextual edition of his most multilinear and multisequential work, this paper asks how to reconcile the need of academics with the bullheadedness of publishers who resist the renegotiation of copyright and the marketplace it (once) enabled.

When Users are Authors: Authorship in the Age of Digital Media

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law, 2010

This Article explores what authorship and creative production mean in the digital age. Notions of the author as the creator of the work have, since the passage of the Statute of Anne in 1 710, provided a point of reference for recognizing ownership rights in literary and artistic works in conventional copyright jurisprudence. The role of the author as both the creator and the producer of a work has been seen as distinct and separate from that of the publisher and user. Copyright laws and customary norms protect the author's rights in his creation, and provide the incentive to create. They also allow him to appropriate the social value that his creativity generates as recognition of his contribution towards society. By initially protecting the rights of authors in literary and artistic works as a property right, copyright laws have facilitated market transfers of private rights and directed use of these works toward the most socially beneficial uses. This Article proposes that in the digital age, when users of literary and artistic works are increasingly becoming authors themselves, the notion of authorship provides a mark of identification to connect the original author with the work in a market characterized by an abundance of derivative works and remixes of original content. The notion of authorship in the digital age attributes individual and collaborative contributions to the collective pool of information back to their respective authors. This Article proposes that the networked economy

"What Does It Matter Who Is Writing?: Literary Studies in the Age of Web 2.0"

In the opening of his essay, “What Is an Author?,” Michel Foucault “formulates the theme with which [he] would like to begin” by quoting from Samuel Beckett’s Texts for Nothing: “’What does it matter who is speaking,’ someone said, ‘what does it matter who is speaking.’” In this essay, Foucault wants “to deal solely with the relationship between text and author and the manner in which the text points to this ‘figure’ that, at least in appearance, is outside it and antecedes it.” For Foucault, Beckett’s “indifference” points to “one of the fundamental ethical principles of contemporary writing,” ethical in that it is a kind of “immanent rule” that dominates writing as a practice. This rule, Foucault argues, is best illustrated by tracing “two of its major themes”: first, “that today’s writing has freed itself from the dimension of expression” and, second, that of “writing’s relationship with death.” “In writing,” Foucault claims, "the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is rather a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears." Equally, "the mark of the writer is reduced to nothing more than the singularity of his absence; he must assume the role of the dead man in the game of writing" (342-43). As many people have explained, for Foucault, the death of the author is the birth of Discourse, or what in this essay he calls “discourses that are endowed with the ‘author-function’” (346). Specifically, Foucault explains – in that very French way of his – that in this essay he aims to “locate the space left empty by the author’s disappearance, follow the distribution of gaps and breaches, and watch for the openings that this disappearance uncovers” (345). And for the most part, this essay is cited for its contributions in locating that space brought into being with the author’s death. But what interested me in returning to “What Is an Author” was the amount of space that Foucault dedicates in the essay to explaining both the term “author” and the term “work” and his focus, specifically, on literary discourses. And he does so in ways that I think are productive for exploring the issue of literary studies in the age of web 2.0. In our most utopian moments in thinking about technology, we echo Beckett’s “indifference” to the question “What does it matter who is writing?” in our celebration of the leveling, transformative effects of Web 2.0. Those effects may be best reflected in David Gauntlett’s explanation of Media Studies 2.0. Ultimately the issue I want to explore in my book – the issue of literary studies in the age of web 2.0 – is also an issue of literacy versus the literary, and this difference may be one of the reasons why “New Media Studies” may have found a more hospitable home in Rhetoric Departments than in English. As Foucault goes on to explain: "The coming into being of the notion of “author” constitutes the privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas, knowledge, literature, philosophy, and the sciences. Even today, when we reconstruct the history of a concept, literary genre, or school of philosophy, such categories seem relatively weak, secondary, and superimposed scansions in comparison with the solid and fundamental unit of the author and the work" (What Is an Author 342). Literary Studies, I will argue, can’t exist without authors, even when – or maybe even especially when – those authors are discursive formations or cultural dominants that work with the text in constitutive ways. The cultural logic that operates in Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark still works as a kind of author-function to keep blackness from appearing in an American literary text. And so here we can begin to see why the question, “What does it matter who is writing?” – the question, I would argue, of Web 2.0 -- begins to become a scary one for literary critics. Taste, judgment, and external authority are certainly three of the ways in which discourse functions to normalize and discipline, and as such they become contestable terms. And to be sure the essentialized ways in which these terms function to mark the genius and authority of the Romantic Poet historically come to mean lots of bad things. But what I want to suggest in my book is that one of the effects of literary studies in the age of web 2.0 is to point out how much of what we do – and how much of our own critical authority – is a matter of taste and judgment. And how the “Whiggery” of the Internet can reduce that critical judgment to the indifferent voice of Beckett’s question, “What difference does it make who’s writing?” Mark Poster argues that Beckett's question “poses the challenge of a planetary system of networked information machines and human assemblages;” and that “until we develop a critical theory that is able to raise this question in our media context we cannot expect to contribute significantly to the formation of a discourse of postnational democratic forms of power.” In my talk, I will argue that one way that literary studies can contribute to that discourse is for it to recuperate and redefine the terms in which we think the literary. Specifically, I propose that we rethink the terms Taste, Judgment, and the Imagination.