The Author in Cyberspace

    The author has been redefined, reevaluated, and recreated by thinkers since the start of the digital age. Mark Poster, in the fifth chapter (“Authors Analogue and Digital”) of his What’s the Matter with the Internet, however, focused on redefining and reevaluating authorship and the authorship shift that occurred in the digital generation. From analogue to digital, the shift in authorship represented  a historical shift as much as a social shift. We went from a linear mentality from the age of guilds and hierarchies to an unorganized, democratic cyberspace of simultaneity. The author argument remains heavily disputed since, as Poster points out, we are still in the birth process of the digital age and the answer won’t even be predictable until the end of the modern digital age.

    There must, however, still be a certain opinion about the new digital author that Poster doesn’t explicitly state. I found myself drawn to his arguments and in support of the observations he thoughtfully explained in his work. Although Poster attempts to be unbiased in his arguments (mainly to avoid being called a technological determinist), I inferred an underlying sentiment of support for this new transition. As people and time changes, so must certain functions in society. It doesn’t make sense to hold onto an archaic practice in a contemporary world. Therefore, I contend, and agree, that the authorship shift in our digital age should be fully embraced and taken advantage of so that we can discover humanities specific to our reality. Applying a deconstructionist tint of Postmodernism, I attempted to create a poem by erasing and selecting one word or one phrase at a time until a coherent thought summarizing Poster’s opinion emerged.

The Author in Cyberspace

by Susan Lee

    “Digital authors are not simply separated from their words, as they are in the print media, but reconfigured by their relation to the machinic apparatus. Because digital writing may be rewritten with ease, the stability of words on paper is lost, severing the link between author and text that was established with so much difficulty during the first centuries of print, as we have seen. The cultural practice of taking authors of books as trustworthy authorities, as persons of possibly great creativity, is difficult to reproduce in the case of digital texts on the Internet. This, of course, by no means prevents the establishment of a new cultural practice in which authorship as we know it is somehow sustained. But the case of digital texts does indicate a rupture in existing practices and the need for a new invention of authorship.

    When analogue authors were installed in the cultural landscape the modern subject was being articulated in discourse and practiced in daily life. The figure of the analogue author fit well with the emerging sense of the body as private, the self as separate from the world of objects, and the investment in rationality as human essence and consciousness as the source of meaning. It fit well wit the practice of distanced relations of the free enterprise market, the theory of representative democracy, and secular education in literacy and mathematics. It fit well, in addition with the narcissistic arrogance of European superiority and imperialist adventure and with patriarchy in its new articulation in the urban nuclear family. Each of these hallmarks of modernity had its own temporality; by no means was all of this some unified essence, some spirit of the age, or even some revolutionary project of a well-define group of political agents. 

    Digital writing emerges at a very different point of history, which might be characterized as follows: The broadcast media, as many have argued, have done much to diminish or even dissolve the rational, autonomous ego. Global capitalism is reconstructing planetary relations along very different lines from older colonialism. The viability and even legitimacy of leading modern institutions is no longer secure, even though alternatives are by no means obvious. Digital authorship arrives, then, in a specific context and the shape it is given in the decades to come will owe much to that context as well as to its material characteristics. It is my contention that the more beneficent configuration of digital authorship can come only from practices that explore its particular potentials, perhaps with an eye to the best that analogue authorship has offered but by no means with a sense that at best we can only repeat its achievements. This is a great moment to experiment with digital forms of writing and communication, even though these experiments will be resisted by the gatekeepers of authorship-- the watchdogs of copyright, printing establishments, tenure committees, and so many others...

Many of the features of digital authorship, as they affect the conditions of work in the humanities, are in some sense anticipated in the modern period. From the novels of Lawrence Sterne to the theoretical practice of Roland Barthes, anticipations of hypertext, for instance, may be gleaned. If the digital imaginary is here foreshadowed, the practice of digital authorship had to await the material inscription of networked computing. Only when this rearrangement of ink into bits, this profound destabilization of the trace, occurred could the regime of the author function be transformed in countless practices of symbolic culture. Only then could the Gutenberg Galaxy become overlaid with a universe of cyberspace,” (Poster 97-100).