Participation Literacy

Several structuralists and poststructuralist critics have addressed the question “what is an author?” (Barthes, 1977), (Foucault, 1984). The author discourse is most often about intertextuality and originality questions. All texts are intertwined, rendering some sort of collective text where originality is questionable.

What is an author in the Web 2.0 environment? The question is both linked to the structuralist/poststructuralist discourse and the business models in the Web 2.0 concept. The author in this sense is a participant, a collector, a collage artist, a person who collects meanings and from those meanings constructs new meanings, which in its turn will be reconstructed into new meanings by other authors in the next layer of knowledge.

But an author has never been just a producer of originality; an author has always been some sort of business person with the goal of making a living. Modernity separated the author from the publisher and later we also had agents specialised in marketing. In a Web 2.0 environment the author has merged and now has all three functions again.

One example of a Web 2.0 author is Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine. His blog The Long Tail is “A public diary on the way to a book”. People can participate in the creation of this book, through comments in his blog. They can link to the book and reference it in the making, before it becomes a prison cell of text behind its cover. When it is published like an ordinary book, the information layer from his blog is still there to enrich the knowledge, making the text a hybrid between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.

A more pure (or extreme) Author 2.0 example is Jason Kottke with his blog kottke.org. The screenshot shows how he asks his readers to contribute to his authorship. This author-reader flow is reverse to the usual way of viewing the relation between author and reader. Traditionally the author, via an agent or publisher, markets the text whereby the reader buys it unread and reads it. Perhaps the reader likes it, perhaps not. Still, the text is already bought and paid for. This means the author, via 3rd part, can fool the reader to buy the book. Therefore we have reviewers, professionals or friends - and nowadays also collaborative intelligence as in Amazon.com. Another way is to have faith in the reader – if he or she likes the text it might not be so far fetched to think he or she actually would like to pay for it after delivery, so to say. In this scenario one always risks that the reader does not like what they read, and therefore deny paying. It is also a question of morality. How many patrons are willing to contribute, and is that enough for the author to make a living? But in the Web 1.0 very few of us will ever be published. In the Web 2.0 mindset everyone at least has the chance of being read. This kind of authorship has escalated in recent years, much due to smoother financial systems such as PayPal. PayPal has contributed a lot to the growth of the Long Tail.