What Does It Matter Who Is Online? A Review of Authorship in the Digital Age

The notion of the author as a self-conscious agent or an abstract function has been a debatable issue in the technological era. This paper offers a review of one essay and two book chapters on authorship in the digital age to see if the author is dead in this medium. First, I discuss the trust issue among academicians towards digital literature and the credit they assign to author-as-person. Then, I compare the author-reader relationship in hypertexts, printed texts, and Wikis, indicating that in the first two authors are identifiable individuals, while in the third case, authorship is impossible to define. This review, thus, indicates that in analyzing the role of the author in cyberspace, maybe we need various philosophies for different types of texts. Moreover, I review the supremacy of author function in digital literature, showing that today one central question seems to be the authority of readers, who are seemingly dead as persons since they are no more mere recipients of a text; instead, both the author and the reader are users now. Finally, I argue concepts of digital ownership and copyright in the digital world.

کلیدواژه ها:

author function ، authorship ، digital literature ، hypertext ، reader ، user