marmalade skies

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According to Walter Ong, “Writing establishes what has been called ‘context-free’ language or ‘autonomous’ discourse, discourse which cannot be directly questioned or contested as oral speech can because written discourse has been detached from its author” (Ong, 77). This detachment from the author is key—as Ong goes on to explain, it raises the author to a position like that of “the oracle or the prophet”, making the book the relayer of “an utterance from a source” that is remote and unquestionable (78). This removed, oracular position of the author is radically different from the conception of the author in oral culture—a conception based upon the idea that real speech and thought, as Ong observes, “always exist essentially in a context of give-and-take between real persons”(78). The removed, written author moves his ideas into an unnatural, unreal environment where his words are unable to defend themselves or exist in dialogue with other ideas.

Ong develops this analogy, claiming that a similarly unreal environment is created by the computer (79). This claim is contested, however, by George Landow and Paul Delany, who argue that the computer destroys the normal author/reader relationship established in the classic, printed book by allowing for the creation and enjoyment of alternative types of texts—for instance the blog, the hypertext, and the collaborative narrative—all of which function to “weaken the boundaries of the text,” by “correcting the artificial isolation of the text from its contexts …” (Delany & Landow, 12). Exactly how these new, alternative texts weaken those boundaries—destroying isolation and creating a non-autonomous, collaborative discourse reminiscent of oral structures—is the subject of this blog.

Ong’s criticism of the written word is nothing new—in fact, it has existed since the inception of writing. Even Socrates feared the boundaries that a written work instantiates. As he explains to the student Phaedrus:

…writing shares a strange feature with painting. The offsprings of painting stand there as if they are alive, but if anyone asks them anything, they remain most solemnly silent. The same is true of written words. You’d think they were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever. When it has once been written down, every discourse rolls about everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with understanding no less than those who have no business with it, and it doesn’t know to whom it should speak and to whom it should not. And when it is faulted and attacked unfairly, it always needs its father’s support; alone, it can neither defend itself nor come to its own support. (Phaedrus, 275e)

Raffaele Simone expands upon Socrates’ viewpoint arguing: “Once written, the text can end up in the hands of individuals unable to understand it and moreover it cannot be defended or commented on by its author” (245). This invincible quality of the text, Simone claims, “is due to the fact that the text, once in black and white, becomes stable” (245). According to Simone, this is not a positive development—by becoming stable, the written text “loses its capacity to meet the receiver’s questions and becomes inert,” losing its “expressive richness compared to the oral version” (245). Thus, by becoming stable, the text recedes from both the supervision of the author and the questioning of the reader, becoming an inert, crystallized entity.

J. David Bolter also offers an interpretation of Socrates’ fear of textual stability. According to Bolter, Socrates believes that this crystallization makes “written words on a page … dead things” which cannot “explain themselves or adjust themselves to various readers.” This process of adjustment and explanation is possible only “in philosophical conversation, the kind of questioning and answering that Socrates himself practices” (Bolter 110-11). Indeed, Bolter goes on to argue that Plato, in constructing the Socratic dialogues, purposely tries to undermine this characteristic of the written word. Bolter develops this claim, saying:

As the Phaedrus points out, such conversation is spontaneous, capable of going in any direction in order to pursue a problem. And the dialogue itself seems to share that spontaneity: Plato appears to abdicate control of his text by reporting conversations between Socrates and his followers. Yet this apparent abdication gives Plato a subtler control over his reader. Plato leads and instructs his readers in the same way that Socrates leads and instructs his readers in the discussion—by getting them to acquiesce until they are too deeply involved in the argument to reject it. (Bolter, 111).

Plato strives to imitate dialogue in his text, working against the crystallizing quality of the printed word. However, Plato is still limited by the constraints of print—as Bolter observes, although he may replicate a back-and-forth discourse, it is not a genuine one. As Bolter remarks: “What is true of all writing is painfully obvious in a dialogue: the form invites the reader to participate in a conversation and then denies him or her full participation” (Bolter, 111). Thus, ironically, in rejecting the constraints of print and trying to rebel against them, Plato ends up highlighting the restrictions of the printed word.

Marshall McLuhan uses Descartes’ preface to his Principles of Philosophy as another example of how the printed word can supply an undesirable level of stability. In the preface, Descartes claims that his book “may first of all be run through in its entirety like a novel, without forcing the attention unduly upon it. […] It is only necessary to mark with a pen the places where difficulty is found, and continue to read without interruption to the end” (qtd in McLuhan, 156). McLuhan believes that Descartes’ instructions indicate a change in thought due to the advent of print—specifically that “there is no more need, as there had been in oral philosophy, to probe and check each term. The context will now do” (McLuhan, 156). McLuhan envisions a reader who no longer questions the text or engages in dialogue with it, even the limited and false dialogue that Plato creates. The reader, rather, has become a passive absorber of a stable work.

And as the work becomes more stable, the author also becomes increasingly remote. Rather than being a character in the book—a member of the dialogue, like Plato—the author developed into a figure in direct opposition to that of the reader. Raffaele Simone defines this position as that of authorial “pre-eminence.” Simone argues that a closed text implies a definite author (or authors). This author is the single source of the text’s contents—their pure and only creator. Further, as the text’s creator, the author becomes in some measure responsible for the text. This responsibility, Simone claims, means that the author alone has “the right to touch the text and above all to decide when it is perfectum […] only then, is it closed to others and can the reader gain access…” (Simone, 242). The author is totally in control of the work; this total control prevents a dialogue with the text.

Roland Barthes describes a similarly domineering, classical-conception of the author in his essay The Death of the Author, but he ends by envisioning, in contrast, a new, modern writer—a figure he names “the scriptor.” The scriptor is “with the text” and “is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, [he] is not the subject with the book as predicate. There is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now.” This scriptor—whose text is independent of its past—”opens” the text for Barthes. Because the scriptor’s text is eternally present, it is unfixed and unstable, capable of being questioned and redirected by its readers. Because of the scriptor, the text becomes an oral rather than a written construct.

Simone, in his conclusion, observes that the computer allows authors to behave more like scriptors. The computer, according to Simone, “actually leaves [the text] open, and indefinitely open at that […] it suffices to fix the pointer somewhere in the text to be able to reintervene, indefinitely reopening something which was presumed closed ” (250). In this way, electronic writing directly reestablishes an oral relationship between text, author, and reader.

In addition to the textual openness that Simone cites, there are several ways that electronic writing makes texts more oral. Carla Hesse believes that an important one is temporal simultaneity. She states that, using computers, “public exchange through the written word can occur without deferral, in a continuously immediate present”—a phrase not unlike Barthes’ eternal here and now. Further, Hesse interprets this immediacy, like Barthes, as representing “the escape of writing from fixity” (Hesse, 27). The immediate responses allowed by the computer—as much as they destroy fixity—are very much oral in nature. So oral, in fact, that Davis and Brewer claim that “electronic discourse is writing that very often reads as if it were being spoken” (Davis & Brewer, 2). The responsiveness of electronic writing can be seen as directly mimicking conversation—hearkening back to the ideas and relationships of orality while remaining grounded in literary convention.

Most importantly, by destroying fixity and making the text more responsive, the electronic reader becomes an empowered player in the interpretation of a text. As Espen Aarseth observes, while “The reader is (and has always been) a necessary part of the text, […but] we now realize [he] can (or must) perform more than one function” (Aarseth, 74). Jay David Bolter describes this function specifically: “The computer medium encourages a writer to open a new kind of dialogue with the reader. This dialogue replaces the monologue that is the conventional printed essay or monograph […] the electronic reader assumes at least partial control of the argument” (Bolter, 117).

This kind of partial control makes the reader into a semi-collaborator with the author. This is a claim that echoes Barthes‘ observations in his essay From Work to Text. According to Barthes, the “text” is unclosed (in comparison with the finished “work”)—a definition that fits the description of electronic writing. Because the text is unclosed, the author cannot be its single source (recall Simone, above); indeed, according to Barthes, the text “asks of the reader a practical collaboration” in establishing its meaning.

Further, it seems as though the greater category of collaboration can subsume both of the earlier-cited qualities—namely the openness of Simone and the temporal simultaneity of Hesse, Davis, and Brewer. Indeed, in order for a text to be collaborative, it must be open (capable of being worked upon) as well as responsive with a fair degree of temporal simultaneity (collaborative efforts appearing promptly enough to allow interactivity). It is not a far leap to observe that this collaborative aspect of electronic texts appears to rectify most directly Ong’s (and Plato’s) initial criticism of writing—in a collaborative text, the reader is constantly aware of the author and his intent, and vice versa. The author is never remote nor is the text autonomous or capable of being misinterpreted. Rather, a dialogue can be established between author, reader, and written word—recreating a spoken conversation.

One of the earliest forms of electronic text with a collaborative format was the weblog or “blog.” Of all electronic texts, blogs are perhaps best able to recreate the sense of oral communication, establishing a temporally immediate conversation around a piece of writing.

Rebecca Blood defines the earliest weblogs as “link-driven sites … accompanied by the editor’s commentary” (Blood, 8 ). “Weblog editors sometimes contextualize an article by juxtaposing it with an article on a related subject; each article, considered in the light of the other, may take on additional meaning, or even draw the reader to conclusions contrary to the implicit aim of each” (10). Weblog editors make media articles intertextual—and through their commentary upon them, begin to set up a dialogue about their content.

Later weblogs evolved into what Blood names the “short-form journal”—a space for the author to post reflections upon their daily life, allowing readers to comment upon these reflections. In addition to prose, a journal-style blogger might post links that would take readers, Blood says, “to the site of another blogger with whom the first was having a public conversation or had met the previous evening, or to the site of a band he had seen the night before. Full-blown conversations were carried on between three or five blogs, each referencing the other in their agreement or rebuttal of the other’s positions” (10). Blood specifically names these interactions “conversation”—a sign that the contents of each blog, the “text” that had been electronically “published” by the author, functions as part of a dialogue.

This thesis is further supported by Glenn Fleischman, who observes that it is: “one thing to push words out on random pages. It’s another to be able to archive, sort and respond to brief snippets and longer essays. The structure [of a blog] enables readers to have a more direct relationship with the writer that builds over time” (Fleischman, 110). Because blog posts can be commented upon or linked to in ways that either undermine or support its content, as Kline and Burstein argue, “the once impermeable boundaries between creator and consumer, between viewer and participant, are now blurring if not disappearing entirely” (Kline & Burstein, 249-50). The creator of a blog no longer inhabits that oracular position of which Ong spoke—a blogger creates, but he does not control.

Indeed, the users and commentators on a blog can perhaps be seen as equally important as the creator, if not actually creators themselves. Biz Stone reflects upon this, saying: “In an ideal situation, reader comments are an extension of the original post—a conversation that takes place right on your site and adds value to your initial thought” (Stone, 104).

Henry Jenkins realizes this, as well, when he worries about the reviews his print essay ‘Digital Renaissance‘ will receive online. Jenkins speculates: “Once this column appears, my authorial control ends and their’s [the bloggers’ and online commentators’] begins. As these words move through various contexts, they assume new associations and face direct challenges…” (Jenkins, 180). While Jenkins initiates the work, it will most likely develop into something beyond his original envisioning as it is challenged and discussed. It is perhaps this development that David Kline is thinking of when he claims that blogs mimic oral storytelling (Kline & Burstein, I Blog, Therefore I Am, 246)—in an oral story, there is one person who begins the story, but it is expanded upon and refracted through the audience, developing in new and unforeseen ways.

Indeed, sometimes the conversation becomes entirely independent of the initial creator. Biz Stone gives the following example:

Blogger Jason Kottke once asked the question: ‘Who owns the conversation on my website?’ when the number of comments on one of his posts exploded to over 700 in two weeks’ time and continued to grow. […] Surging bandwidth costs dictated that Jason turn off the commenting, but he was torn because the conversation seemed genuine and intelligent. He even compared the comments to a kind of group-authored series of books: ‘Those 700 comments comprise a total of ~125,000 words (~180 per entry); that’s about 3.3 150 -page books […] Who am I to shut down a conversation that I’m not involved in? This may be my site, but the participants own the conversation. As much as it makes sense to shut it down, I’m inclined to let the participants go as long as they want.’ (Stone, 105)

In the end, Kottke let the conversation end naturally and then archived the comments for public viewing. Stone, however, reflecting on the affair, makes an interesting claim: “It doesn’t really matter whether or not Jason owns the comments; he is responsible for them either way” (Stone, 105-106). This seems like a radical new vision of authorship—the author is the facilitator of a conversation, a vision that gels well with Kline’s and Jenkins’ images. Here Stone takes that idea a bit further, making the author responsible for the conversation that he inspires—conversations that can, perhaps, mimic a “group-authored series of books” (Stone, 105).

For, indeed, the blog world seems to be increasingly invading the space assigned to the book. Kim White, presenting a paper for The Institute for the Future of the Book at the 2005 Computers and Writing Online Conference, defines these new book blogs as “blogs devoted to the writing and/or discussion of a particular book, by that book’s author.” While not exactly purely collaborative books, these blog sites gather material, generate discussion, and build a community of readers around an eventual book. This has the effect, White claims, of “gently undermin[ing] the conventional notion of the book as a crystallized object and begin[ning] to reinvent it as an ongoing process: an evolving artifact at the center of a conversation.” By making the pre-writing process collaborative—the center of a conversation—these book blogs represent the first step along the road to a contextualized and dialogic (perhaps oral) text.

White offers several examples of book blogs. Among the most interesting is the book blog “Without Gods” by Mitchell Stephens (a professor of journalism at New York University), who is using the blog to draft a book on the history of atheism. Stephens claims the blog allows “the conversation [to] be joined: ideas challenged, facts corrected, queries answered” with the result “that lively and intelligent discussion will ensue.” As ideas are posed and commented upon, the book-writing process becomes dialogic in a way that Plato could not have imagined.

Indeed, Stephens describes his project as sort of a “Bonner’s Field”—a park in mid-nineteenth century London, where speakers “would mount soapboxes to disclaim on any number of radical, or not so radical or anti-radical, causes. Crowds would cheer, hiss or answer back.” Stephens’ blog attempts to simulate this sort of spoken discourse, directly making idea development dialogic. And it is the collaborative blog—with its instant comment feature—that is allowing him to turn his book into a discourse.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, the author of another (potential) blog book called The End of Cyberspace, argues that Stephens and other academics like him have recognized that “the blog is the ultimate research tool,” and their blogs will turn “research into a form of public performance.” Generalizing upon his personal experience, Pang claims that blog-based research has allowed him publicly to intertextualize his “citations, notes, reflections on other people’s work, connections [drawn] between [his] work and others’” as he composes ideas. Pang has found that the comments on the blog are especially stimulating—they give him “the ability to see how people are reacting [to the text] in real time.” Thus, for Pang, the process of composition is becoming simultaneous and collaborative in the way that both Barthes and Hesse anticipated.

Pang’s final thesis is exciting if perhaps excessively optimistic; he claims that the book-blog shifts academic research towards

…a model of scholarly performance in which the value resides not exclusively in the finished, published work, but is distributed across a number of usually non-competitive media. […] It could ultimately point to a somewhat different model for both doing and evaluating scholarship: one that depends a little less on peer-reviewed papers and monographs, and more upon your ability to develop and maintain a piece of intellectual territory, and attract others to it—to build an interested, thoughtful audience.

Pang appears to be supporting Kline’s and Jenkins’ visions of the blogger/author—an individual that acts as a facilitator rather than an impresario. He can build an audience that responds simultaneously to his ideas as they are formulated, allowing for the creation of a text that is collaborative rather than isolated. The blog appears to have invented a process for text creation that directly refutes the criticisms of print as “autonomous,” “context-free” and “authorially remote.”

And while the blog appears to challenge these criticisms through its re-envisioning of a collaborative text-creation process, the hypertext can perhaps be viewed as affecting change through a collaborative text-reading process

Hypertext is a term that was first used by Theodor H. Nelson in the 1960s, who defined it as “non-sequential writing – text that branches and allows choices to the reader, best read at an interactive screen. As popularly conceived, this is a series of text chunks connected by links which offer the reader different pathways” (qtd in Landow, 18). Jay David Bolter specifically compares the choice-rich hypertext to a spoken dialogue, claiming that “A hypertextual essay in the computer is always a dialogue between the writer and his or her readers, and the reader has to share the responsibility for the outcome.” Both hypertexts and dialogues “[speak] with more than one voice and therefore shar[e] or postpon[e] responsibility” (Bolter, 117). Bolter further surmises that “For writers of the new dialogue, the task will be to build, in place of a single argument, a structure of possibilities. The new dialogue will be, as Plato demanded, interactive: it will provide different answers to each reader and may also in Plato’s words from the Phaedrus, know ‘before whom to be silent’” (in Landow, Bolter, 117). Thus Bolter envisions the process of reading a hypertext as dialogic and interactive.

This interactivity can be viewed as synonymous with collaboration—even to the point of, perhaps, collaborative authorship. As Sven Birkerts insists: “the hypertext writer need not work alone.” Birkerts goes on to observe: “Already users can create texts in all manner of collaborative ways—trading lines, writing parallel texts that merge, moving independently created sets of characters in and out of communal fictional space” (Birkerts, 160). Indeed, Birkerts surmises that this collaborative option is the true strength of the genre.

Birkerts most notable example of collaborative authorship is Robert Coover’s ‘hypertext hotel’, a creative writing project established by Coover and his students at Brown, where, as Birkerts summarizes, “writers were free to check in, to open new rooms, new corridors, new intrigues, to unlink texts or create new links, to intrude upon or subvert the texts of theirs, to alter plot trajectories, manipulate time and space, to engage in dialogue through invented characters, then kill of one another’s characters or even sabotage the hotel’s plumbing” (Birkerts, 160). Users can move indistinguishably back and forth between their position as reader and writer—a textual collaboration that surpasses that of the blog—forming what Delany and Landow call “an open-ended structure of knowledge that readers continuously extend and re-organize” (Delany & Landow, 33).

Bolter also supports this idea of collaborative author/readership. He uses as an example the hypertext afternoon by Michael Joyce, arguing that

The author of “Afternoon” wrote the prose and poetry for each episode, and he fashioned electronic structures of expectation and fulfillment on analogy with the static structures of print fiction. But in giving the reader a role in realizing those structures, he has also ceded some of his traditional responsibility as author. This sharing of responsibility points the way in which electronic writing will continue to develop: we can envision an electronic fiction in which the reader is invited to alter existing episodes and links and add new ones. In this way the reader becomes a second author, who can then hand the changed text over to other readers for the same treatment. Electronic fiction can operate anywhere along the spectrum from rigid control by the author to full collaboration between author and reader. (Bolter, 144)

Thus collaboration can be seen as destroying the fixed nature of the work and the remote, unquestioned position of the author.

Delany and Landow take a less-innovative stance on hypertext collaborativity. They appear to ignore the opportunities presented for truly collaborative authorship (and thus multivocality), focusing instead on hypertext’s ability to situate itself within a realm of other supportive/contradictory texts. Landow and Delany claim that the hypertext allows the “reader both to annotate an individual text and also to link it to other, perhaps contradictory texts” and, in so doing, destroys “its separation and univocal voice”, forcing “it to exits as part of a complex dialogue” (Delany & Landow, 13). While this claim is true and indeed pertinent, it presents the hypertext as a glorified blog—a view that is reductive rather than inspirational.

In returning, however, to the claims of reader-empowerment posited by hypertext proponents, it is perhaps important to remember the two important caveats that Espen Aarseth offers. In Cybertext he states that,

Even if we can no longer use the word author in a meaningful way (after all, today’s complex media productions are seldom, if ever, run by a single ‘man behind the curtain’), it would be irresponsible to assume that this position has simply gone away, leaving a vacuum to be filled by the audience. (Aarseth, 165)

Thus, while collaboration is allowed and encouraged by the hypertext, the hypertext does not do away with the author.

Indeed perhaps the hypertext author becomes, in some cases, more domineering. Aarseth addresses this, cautioning:

the [hypertext] user can be manipulated in new and powerful ways. In a narrated, linear-expression text, the user/reader/receiver’s response and interpretation are beyond the control of the author, who can only hope that the text will be read from beginning to end. […] in a hypertext, the author can make sure that the user must go through a particular sequence to access a certain part […] to suggest that the user is able to determine the shape of such a text is the same as to confuse the influence of a city’s tourist guide with that of a city planner. (Aarseth, 138-9)

Here Aarseth appears to be arguing that the sense of reader-empowerment is illusory–the hypertext author is, instead, expressing an even more despotic control over his text.

Aarseth later acknowledges, however, that the threat of such potential despotism is overblown. The true test of whether the hypertext-reader is empowered–whether the text is being formed collaboratively–depends, he claims, upon “whether the user has the ability to transform the text into something that the instigator of the text could not foresee or plan for” (Aarseth, 164). And this is what the hypertext allows. The writer, while he can demand a specific ordering, does not practice complete control. The reader plots his own course through the text–indeed, in order for it to be a hypertext, the writer must supply the reader with multiple reading paths. There can be no single, correct method of reading, as in the linear progression from page to page of a printed work–such a style is anti-thetical to the hypertext genre.

Thus, with Aarseth, one must conclude that the hypertext is in some way inherently collaborative.  The reader-empowerment it allows is unique to the hypertext–a way of forming a collaborative text not available in the print medium–and such empowerment ultimately inhibits authorial absolutism.

A final electronic medium of interest is that of the networked book. Indeed, the networked book represents perhaps the best synthesis of the text-creating and text-reading collaboration allowed by electronic media.

Kim White in her paper for the 2005 Computers and Writing Online Conference offers a definition for the networked book—according to White, the networked book has four primary characteristics. Firstly, it is open—its content can be altered by the reader. Secondly, it has a disaggregated structure—it is composed of smaller pieces that can be manipulated and reorganized (thanks to the book’s “openness”). It is also social, meaning that authorship is collaborative. Lastly, the networked book is processed—an act that White describes as the reader/editor “implement[ing] strategies for marking out meaningful pathways through the material using search engines and visualization applications.”

White’s definition seems to recall the Barthesian text—an open work that asks the reader to participate in its formation. Further, these aspects of openness, sociability, and disaggregation can be applied to oral structures—a conversation can be begun, dropped, or redirected by any of the participants, with each person’s contributions shaping its final form.

More specifically, the networked book functions to make the author into a facilitator as Pang, the book-blogger, envisioned—especially when considering White’s requirement for “processing.” Ben Vershbow, posting on if:Book, wonders how the comments that reader’s provide on a networked book will contribute to the final product: “If selections from the comments are integrated in a subsequent version — either directly in the text or in some sort of appending critical section — [the author] could find himself performing the role of editor, or curator. A curator of discussion…” (06.02.2006, 7:26 PM). This idea of a curator is especially relevant when considering McKenzie Wark’s GAM3R 7H30RY (see below).

The earliest example of the networked book is Wikipedia—what Ben Vershbow calls “the networked book, par excellence,” going on to describe it as a “vast, interwoven compendium of popular knowledge, never fixed, always changing, recording within its bounds each and every stage of its growth and all the discussions of its collaborative producers” (05.02.2006, 1:09 AM).
In this sense, Wikipedia represents the ultimate form of reader-empowerment—there is no one author or one vision for any article.

Indeed, Jesse Wilbur, another member of the Institute for the Future of the Book, believes that this lack of authorship could be a flaw. Wilbur claims on if:Blog that an open system requires rules to integrate the content posted by different authors. These rules establish “a high median standard for quality,” but give the work what Wilbur calls “a mechanical sensibility”—it is a tradeoff: “quality is derived at the expense of distinctive voices.”

The issue of “mechanical sensibility” is, however, dwarfed by the other fears that Wikipedia inspires. In “Feral Hypertext,” Jill Walker claims that Wikipedia is the perfect example of an electronic text gone feral–it is a “large collaborative projec[t] that generate[s] patterns and meanings without any clear authors or editors controlling the linking […] these feral projects accept messiness, errors and ignorance, and devise ways of making sense from vast numbers of varying contributions” (Walker, 2).

In such messiness, it is accuracy that may get lost–as Larry Sanger (one of the co-founders of Wikipedia) claims to New Yorker reporter Stacy Schiff, “too many Wikipedians are fundamentally suspicious of experts and unjustly confident of their own opinions. Indeed, Sanger has gone on to create his own “scholar-reviewed” version of the electronic encyclopedia in the hopes of eliminating the inaccuracy and anarchy inherent in Wikipedia. Thus, there is always the possibility that collaboration can go too far–that the voice of the author is totally subsumed in the anarchy of reader self-expression, creating something that is neither accurate nor particularly interesting.

Further, in thus destroying authorial voice, wikis also appear to destroy authorial authority. As Kim White wonders on if:Book: “Does the anonymous group author have the same authority as the credentialed single author? Is our belief in the quality of information inextricably connected to our belief in the authority of the writer?” While Wikipedia claims that collaborative authorship and peer review via direct peer revision make its entries increasingly more trustworthy, it is still regarded with suspicion. Indeed, Sanger has recently decided to launch a scholarly-edited rival to Wikipedia called “Citizendium.” Whether Citizendium will prove as popular or lasting as Wikipedia is unclear, but it heralds a return to a more fixed, authoritative position for the author.

Geoffrey Nunberg may describe the ideal, networked book best—according to Nunberg, the networked book’s main function should be to stimulate discussion around the text (Arnoldy). Nunberg is once again envisioning an author-facilitator, who sparks audience discussion. Jesse Wilbur also speculates in this vein, musing that, for online writers in the future, “their work is going to be judged by how interesting the conversation is” (qtd in Arnoldy). Both men appear to agree—the networked book should instigate a discussion, acting as a forum for dialogue around a central theme.

There are various networked-texts currently in circulation. Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig has taken his book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, first printed in 1999, and wikified it, allowing interested readers to collaborate on the editing and updating. When this process is finished, it will be published as Code, v.2. At Yale University Press they have set up a wiki to allow readers of Yochai Benkler’s book, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom to summarize and comment on the book. Another example is Pulse by Robert Frenay—a book on the “biologic” technology inspired by animate objects. The book is nearly 600 pages long in print but is being serialized on a blog—a choice that the people at The Institute for the Future of the Book find, perhaps, inappropriate (Vershbow, 18 April 2006).

Perhaps the ideal forum Nunberg describes is best achieved by one of The Institute for the Future of the Book’s most recent projects—GAM3R 7H30RY, an online draft of the upcoming book Gamer Theory by McKenzie Wark, a professor at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College. The instituted has published the draft in what Vershbow describes as: “a compelling interface designed to gather reader feedback” paired with “a series of free-fire discussion zones” (2 May 2006). The interface is a series of colored cards through which the reader navigates. Each paragraph has its card, and next to each of card is a box for reader comments. Unlike in a wiki, however, readers affect the text only indirectly—through their posted comments and the possibility that Wark will make use of their suggestions.

Vershbow acknowledges, however, that this is not a perfect project—the card-based design of GAM3R 7H30RY emphasizes chunks of text, which risks “giving the impression that paragraphs are self-contained, or that this is a book that can be read selectively,” a risk further exacerbated by “situating [the text] in a web browser, where people are accustomed to skipping around” (24 May 2006). Further, because GAM3R 7H30RY is actually a book rather than a cybertext, its argument is linear—a point which can prove confusing to the reader, who often (according to Vershbow) ends up “at times needlessly debating propositions that are elucidated in subsequent paragraphs, simply because they seemed final in the context of the card.”

Caveats aside, it appears that GAM3R 7H30RY most closely mimics the dialogue of an oral debate. On one of the forums associated with the text, Sol Gaitan observes that, when reading GAM3R 7H30RY,

my reading ceases to be a solitary act. This reminds me of the old custom of reading aloud in groups, when books were still a luxury. That kind of reading allowed for pauses, reflection and exchange. The difference now is that the exchange affects the book, but it’s not the author who chooses with whom he shares his manuscript, the manuscript does. (27 May 2006)

Wark replies to Gaitan, saying: “Not only is reading not here a solitary act, but nor is it conducted in isolation from the writer.” Thus in GAM3R 7H30RY not only has the contents of the book lost its autonomousness, the author has lost his remoteness as well.  He has become something of a facilitator, in the sense that Pang envisioned.

Roger Sperberg, posting to TeleRead, also believes that GAM3R 7H30RY has altered the reading process, making it more dialogic and de-emphasizing the author’s authority. As Sperberg observes, reader contributions perhaps

are inseparable now from the initial comments of author McKenzie Wark, since I read them not after the fact but co-terminously (word? not “simultaneously” but “at the same time”). My own perception of the author’s ideas is shaped by the collaborating readers’ ideas even before it has solidified. What the author has to say has broadened almost immediately into what the book has to say. (26 May 2006)

And Wark does not seem too upset about his loss of authority. Rather, he enjoys the dialogue he develops with his readers. One benefit, as Wark observes to Jeffrey Young, is that “you outsource the proofreading”—indeed Wark claims: “I’m loving that because I’m bad at it.” And while some of the comments have been less than kind, Wark doesn’t remove any of them.  Wark believes that most of the responses have been thoughtful—as Young notes: “a look at the more than 300 comments reveal that readers are examining the book’s argument closely and posting specific suggestions.” While this isn’t a wiki (as Wark notes on the associated “Act of Reading” Forum: “this author isn’t that ready to play that dead”), one has the feeling that the reader is directly affecting and becoming integrated into the text.

Indeed, the comments to Wark’s text become almost a secondary text in themselves—illuminating Wark’s personality, the characters of his readers, and the thinking behind his composition process. These comments provide the perfect example of a Platonic interplay: they allow the author to ensure that his text is being interpreted correctly, and they allow the text to spark discussion between the readers and the author.

One such interplay occurs between Wark, Virgina Kuhn, cburke, and s on card 100. The conversation begins when s observes rather cuttingly “This chapter requires heavy re-write if the objective is to suggest the MIEC has a ‘mind of its own’ and convincing everyone of that is unlikely.” Virginia Kuhn replies to s, offering her interpretation of the MIEC as a form of hegemony and noting her interest in Wark’s observations about the transformation of the “space/time relationship to the analog/digital.” In Wark’s response to Virigina Kuhn, he expresses interest in her thoughts on the analog/digital but totally disagrees with her hegemonic interpretation (as he states baldly “i don’t use the idea of hegemony here”). In the end, cburke turns the conversation to the question of whether digital sources allow a “more democratic flow of information”—an idea that Wark only partially supports, encouraging his readers to read on to hear his full mind on the matter.

In this interplay, the four have created a sort of secondary text—one that explains how the work should and should not be interpreted, prompts the readers to explore the text further and encourages readers’ observations (such as Kuhn’s on the analog/digital), perhaps even allowing the author (if Wark chooses to alter this section of Gamer Theory as s suggests) to adapt his text to reader criticism.

Sometimes these dialogues get out of hand, however—revealing much of the personality of the author and his attitude towards his work. One such example occurs on card 011, after Paula Berinstein suggests that an outline to the book would prove helpful, because “That way, your readers wouldn’t necessarily have to read every word before making a comment that might turn out to be premature”—a concern similar to Vershbow’s, above. In the resulting thread, Sal observes “I think this writing so far deploys tired old stereotypes about games and gamers, and much more complex thinking on both is possible. It may well be that some of this is addressed later in the work, but for now it frustrates the hell out of me.”

Wark’s reply to Sal is startlingly truculent: “Of course it starts with the ’stereotype’” Wark lectures, “SO THAT IT CAN BE FLIPPED AROUND LATER, AS PEOPLE WHO CAN READ MORE THAN 200 WORDS AT A TIME WILL FIGURE OUT.” The conversation thereafter gets even nastier, with Sal replying that “YELLING AT ME FOR HAVING A SHORT ATTENTION SPAN DOESN’T ACTUALLY MAKE ME FEEL MORE WELL DISPOSED TOWARDS YOUR ARGUMENT” and that “IF YOU DONT WANT PEOPLE TO COMMENT UNTIL THEY’VE READ THE WHOLE FUCKING BOOK, DONT PUT THE FACILITY FOR COMMENTS THERE TILL THE END.”

In the end, it is Vershbow who calms the situation down by diplomatically observing: “This highlights a frustration many readers have felt with the somewhat paradoxical nature of the site’s design”—effectively ending the argument. Whereas Sal’s complaint might have been sparked by a genuine problem with the book’s design, Wark’s response indicates his lingering feelings of authorial investment in his text. While it is one thing for Wark to consent to this public-commenting process, it is quite another for him to divest himself of personal attachments to the text that he has created, an attachment that would only be aggravated by harsh (even if realistic) criticism. Indeed, if the networked book represents the future, this is going to be a major obstacle for authors (and their potential readership) to overcome.

A final type of secondary text that springs up around GAM3R 7H30RY involves the lives of the readers. One of the best examples involves a reader called simon—a biological data architect who stays up the whole night to read the text. Interspersed in simon’s criticisms are comments about his life—he posts on card 066 how: “while I read this my wife sleeps in front of the TV. My lover/mistress flirted with it but had no time or patience…women don’t interact with the technolgy [sic] in teh [sic] same way.” Later simon observes on 130: “I smoke. I drink. Occasionally I take mind altering drugs. NOTHING imbibed or ingested compares to flirting on line or real sex. I think (perhaps) the reason I don’t play games on the PC is I KNOW I would become addicted (chemically) to the fix.” The text becomes as much the story of simon, in some ways, as the story of gaming theory. One reads not only to find out where Wark’s argument goes but how simon will interpret it or what simon is doing next during the reading process.

It is an even more meta-textual experience, because the passages that spark simon’s insights lie directly next to simon’s comments, both coloring the other. At the end of the book, on card 225, simon comments: “The mark of a good book can sometimes be what you dream of when its read. So lets see what comes tonight.” simon’s reading is now going to percolate in his mind as he sleeps—not a bad metaphor for the manner in which simon’s commentary has been percolating in the mind of the reader as she experiences Wark’s text. Wark’s text comes to include not only gaming theory but the lives of simon and the other commentators—the reading truly becomes, as Sperberg suggests, highly flavored with the collaborating reader’s viewpoints. GAM3R 7H30RY is not a text that is autonomous, written by an oracular author; the context and the author are present and responsive throughout the reading—GAM3R 7H30RY is a conversation as much as it is a printed work.

What will happen to the online text of GAM3R 7H30RY is unclear—if Wark views himself as a new-age author, one whose job is to inspire conversation, does he also feel responsible for the preservation of that conversation (like Jason Kottke)? The question is still unresolved; while Wark has recently found a publisher (Harvard University Press), he has not yet finished negotiating just how the secondary texts around the book will be treated (Kaminski). Further, once GAM3R 7H30RY is published—whether the secondary texts continue to exist or not—it will be a print book, one that can not respond to its readers, whose author becomes, once more, remote.

One, then, can return to Barthes‘ dire predictions about the death of the author. While electronic fiction seems to have created, perhaps, the Barthesian scriptor—an author that exits contemporaneously with the text—it does not seem to have ended classical senses of authorship (with the possible exception of the wiki). One has only to examine Wark’s networked book to appreciate his authorial control (i.e. his role in designing the site, his responses to the comments, his power to decide ultimately which suggestions will be incorporated) as well as his investment in the text. Further, neither in the blog nor in the hypertext does the author abdicate her position, either.

And while the collaborative process can be seen as recreating oral dialogue—bringing the reader and author into a conversation wherein the text and author can be questioned and explained—it does not totally revolutionize the printed word. And perhaps it is best not to. As Espen Aarseth reflects in Cybertext, “the separation of author and reader is valuable […] we might profit analytically from keeping the institutional and performative aspects apart, at least until we can study the latter more rigorously” (Aarseth, 173). Perhaps the goal should be integration—introducing new ideas about orality and collaboration into the current conception of print—rather than separation—the replacement of the printed word by another medium altogether.

Indeed, the three types of texts examined—the blog, the hypertext, and the networked book—appear to exist somewhere on this integrative continuum. While all appear to emulate oral modes of communication by allowing for collaborative interaction between reader and author, none is perfectly oral. Indeed, as Aarseth suggests, perhaps that is not desirable. However, they correct a flaw in the printed word–they respond to all of Ong’s objections, establishing reader/author dialogue by creating reader/author collaboration.