Abstract of Adriaan van der Weel's paper

Sociotechnical construction of authorship

Prof. Dr. Adriaan van der Weel

Book and Digital Media Studies

Leiden University

Sociotechnical development describes the process through which technologies and humans construct social systems. In this view the construction of authorship vis-à-vis readership cannot be properly explained without taking the prevailing technological conditions into account.
Before the days of print, and thus before the days of commodification of authorship, there was a much less rigid distinction between textual production and its consumption than has become the case in the ‘Order of the Book’ that is now being challenged by digital developments. In the manuscript world, where few could read and write, literacy united author and reader more than the varying forms of their participation in the textual discourse divided them. It was normal, for example, for aspiring authors to appropriate existing texts through copying, imitating and emulating. In manuscript circulation the only difference between participants in the textual discourse was whether they copied or were copied, and if they were copied, how often. The decision to copy or not to copy can thus be constructed as a expression of reader power.
From the middle of the fifteenth century the technology of print proceeded to commodify authorship and, by imposing a system of rigidly one-way traffic, established a hierarchical relationship between author and reader (doubling as a prospective author). Publication in print also came to be regarded as formal recognition of authenticity, originality and social standing (as well as marketability), separating authors from readers.
By contrast, Web 2.0 returns textual discourse to the two-way, co-creative traffic of the manuscript age. This re-establishes a flat, horizontal relationship between author and reader, resulting in a loss of inhibition on the part of readers in using or appropriating authors’ work. There is, however, an important difference with the manuscript tradition in that in today’s Web world readers and writers are no longer part of an elite united through the relatively rare skill of literacy; instead there is, for the first time, mass participation in public textual production superseding a four-hundred year period of mass textual consumption.