Week 3's Readings

 Authorship and Social Production

The module's third week primarily deals with the concept of "co-authorship" that is displayed in online spaces, and how it differs from the authorship being displayed in analogue spaces. While a book has a set order that the writer wants the reader to follow, which allows the author to have a high amount of authority. In contrast to a book, a webpage is far less linear (allowing the reader to interact with the blog however they want), which allows for the reader to have more authority, at the expense of the author. Attention was also drawn to how one can be expected to display and facilitate collaborative efforts over the internet, in addition to persuading, engaging and enacting a stance for prospective readers (Adlington & Feez, 2019). Two of the primary displays of co-authorship on the internet are comments and tags, serving as a techno-semiotic method of communication, on a blog such as this one. Tags function as both a label and a hyperlink towards related posts, allowing for a reader to find related posts easily and form a more coherent blog, along with helping the reader achieve more authority. Commenting on blog posts also allows for a higher level of authority and co-authorship for the blog's viewer, via the facilitation of communication between author and reader. Both of these functions allow for audience feedback to influence and inform text production, and thus facilitate collaborative intelligence (Adlington & Feez, 2019), as mentioned in last week's post. 

To offer an anecdotal example from my own online experiences, my Tumblr allows for me to append my posts with tags that allow for people of certain fandoms to more easily find my posts (since Tumblr allows for their users to follow certain tags, in order to find recent posts in their respective fandoms). Admittedly, most of my followers tend to follow me for my posts pertaining to a select amount of shared fandoms, so my original posts (which are tagged "fusion's thoughts", to separate them from the posts that I reblog) that are tagged with the name of a certain piece of media/character are easier to find for fans of that piece of media/character. Reblogging and replying to other people's posts allow for better communication and stronger collaboration between fellow bloggers (that are often of similar fandoms), to the point that reblogging are considered a key aspect in the Tumblr culture, and people are regularly encouraged to reblog posts (especially when the subject matter pertains to social injustices) to allow for better communication and to easily spread messages across the website. Tags (or "Labels", as they are called here) are also displayed on this very blog, and allows for me to easily categorize the posts by type, while also allowing for the "readers" to more easily find certain posts, should they feel the need to. Are there any other methods you can think of that facilitate communication between fellow bloggers, or function a lot like a "tags and comment" system?

Source: 

Adlington, R., & Feez, S. (2019, February 1). Reading, writing and co-authorship in blogs - The Australian Journal of Language and literacy. SpringerLink. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF03652022