Thursday 28 February 2013

The Death of Authorship on the Internet


With the internet being almost a necessity when it comes to our everyday lives, the notion of authorship becomes somewhat of a difficult term to define when it comes to the accessibility and free-reign of the web. How do we define what is ours and what is not if everything can be distributed and altered without interruption? Does this make anything truly original?
             
Authorship can be defined in its simplest form as the act of creating a piece of work. So in this sense, if someone takes something which has previously been creating and make any sort of alteration it can technically be considered their work as well. With redistribution, P2P and remixes being commonplace in an online sphere, it’s no wonder authorship becomes lost in the process.
            
To sum up Michel Foucault’s thoughts, he believes that the term of one’s “work” is hard to define and original ideas are non-existent. You cannot create something truly new because everything has been used at some point or another. This ties in to the internet because the work and the author must be connected, but if nothing is original then who’s to say that work isn’t theirs as well?
      
Mackenzie Wark brings up how intellectual property has caused information to be placed in chains in a world where information can be transferred easily and quickly. This means that authorship and the idea of individuality are stopping us from creating an informed world as intellectual laws hinder our knowledge and distribution of it at times.
             
A participatory culture is one we are in currently which allows anyone to openly participate via the internet either in a large or small scale way. This means that anyone can become an ‘author’ just by using available material and either changing it to your own or redistributing it.
             
Even major journalism chains have used other journalists writing  on their own sites bringing up the question of what is considered plagiarism and what is just reusing. Are there consequences for these actions? Does this mean even trusted news sources are no longer original either?
             
In our digital age, authorship is almost entirely dead despite intellectual laws which may say otherwise due to the ease of access of knowledge and through social media like Facebook or Twitter someone’s work can be redistributed quickly and effortlessly across the web causing the individual who may have originally conceived it to be lost in the process. At this point it is probably best for us as a society to drop the idea of authorship as it limits our access of knowledge and attempts to create an individualized society which goes against everything the internet has to offer us.

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