This entry is written primarily in response to Andrew Bennett’s chapter “Collaboration” in The Author (Routledge, 2005).
After pointing out that the Oxford English Dictionary identifies the first use of the word “collaborator” in 1802, Andrew Bennett surmises that the idea of authorial collaboration only became significant within “what Jack Stillinger calls the Romantic ‘myth of the solitary genius'” (Stillinger 201, qtd. in Bennett 94). Because authors were arguably not considered to be autonomous nor their works original before this time, the need to use a word like collaboration to describe situations in which more than one author (or authority) had a claim on the content of a text was simply not present. In this chapter, Bennett explores the different ways in which the idea of multiple authorship has been theorized, criticized, and presented throughout the history of literary criticism since the seventeenth century. Though he mentions several versions of collaboration including co-authorship, editing, plagiarism, and even reliance on social and psychological context, Bennett comes to the conclusion that attribution theory, though its focus is ostensibly on the various “voices” found within a given text, actually gives more importance to the idea of authorial intent than it perhaps intends. For the moment, I agree.
My thoughts while reading this chapter kept coming back to social networking and digital collaboration, particularly within the frameworks he mentioned. At its simplest, what digital collaboration does is merely a more streamlined (or at least more technological) way of doing the same things that have been done for centuries: editors mark up copy, though many now use software for the purpose rather than the infamous red pen. Friends and peers “vet” a work and give their opinion and possibly even do some light editing. (In the fan fiction world, this process is referred to as “beta reading” or even as “beta’ing”.) You get the idea. The process, though performed with different instruments, has remained largely the same. My focus, then, is not particularly on the editing aspect; honestly, I don’t really think of editing as a kind of collaboration that takes authority from the author, anyway.
My focus when I consider digital collaboration is twofold: co-authorship and social context. Bennett points out that most of the energy in the criticism of works that have been co-authored (and attributed as such) is put into divining the origins of each part of the text (Bennett 97). This process, especially when applied to works whose authors are no longer living, often involves a highly sophisticated computer program that picks out particular patterns of language known to be attributable to a particular author. All well and good, of course, but within this system the individual author is still privileged. In cases of plagiarism or textual appropriation in either digital or print, this kind of study can be a useful tool in deciphering intertextual elements.
Within the context of digital collaboration, however, co-authorship takes on a much different flavor than was possible in print cultures: in a truly collaborative piece, even sophisticated programs will find it difficult to decipher the sections of text written by individual authors and will consequently find it more difficult to privilege the individual. Within print culture, especially before the widespread use of word processors, individual authors might collaborate by writing separate sections of text, communicating with one another but still essentially autonomous in their own sections. Within a live workspace, however, authors find it possible to collaborate in a much more involved way. This could be as simple as authors writing their own sections of the text but subjecting them to live review by their collaborator, ensuring that the mixture of linguistic habits makes for a more unified text. At its best, though, digital collaboration within the context of a live workspace allows for authors to collaborate across distances instantly, affecting changes on the text on a word-by-word basis rather than a sectional basis. The efficiency of the process, which would have been nearly impossible for authors to achieve even as recently as two decades ago, creates a much more complex linguistic matrix. Within this context, I would be more inclined to agree with Jeffrey Masten that we should not consider collaborative authorship to be a “doubling of ‘author/ity'” but as a “dispersal” of it (Masten 1997:19, qtd. in Bennett 101). Though Masten referred in this work to Renaissance texts, this point is effective when considering acts of purposeful digital collaboration.
Continuing with the idea of multiple authorship or co-authorship as a dispersal of authority rather than a dual or doubling of authority is the examination of appropriation as an unconscious act. I wonder what the effects of our much more textual culture are on digital authors. This can go in about a thousand different directions, of course, from reader response theory on a viral level to the simple appropriation of ideas from whatever news and/or social networking feeds the author subjects herself to. When observing cultural and social constructs outside of the digital arena, an author necessarily (and often unconsciously) must add her own interpretation to what she sees, hears, and reads. In our current digital climate, an author – especially one who supposedly works “on her own”, separate from physical contact with the masses – is given much more access to the interior thoughts and processes of the people “around her”. Prior to the explosion of social networking sites, blogs, and online publication access to anyone with a computer, this access was limited to what she might have shared with a relatively small circle of friends and what was published in printed texts and broadcast on television or radio. Not only is this access to other people’s perceptions increased, but the format in which it is consumed is largely textual – in other words, she shares with the world a medium (digital text) in which everyone’s thoughts may be accessed. With this change, I would argue that unconscious appropriation of social, cultural, and historic ideas would be increased along with her appropriation of the language patterns of those she observes.
Simply stated, collaboration, both purposeful and unconscious, is a completely different ball game in digital culture than it ever has been in print culture. While on the surface it may seem that the only thing that has changed has been the methods by which an author pens his or her work, the medium is acutely affecting the processes by which texts are thought out, conceived, and created.
Digital Authorship 