John Miedema

Reading Causes Writing, Pt. 5. Conclusion to this theme.

Literary theorists talk about the “death of the author”, a view that a work should be considered independent of the personal details of the author. In its place, we have the “birth of the reader”, the new source of meaning when interpreting a text. But things have changed again. Readers have been extended on-line. They publish their thoughts online as they are reading a book. Other readers are influenced by what is being written about a book as they are reading it, and then writing about it themselves. In turn, the writers are reading it back. Furthermore, readers converse with authors of books they are reading, even as the author is writing the next book the reader will later review. We have a new birth, the birth of the reader-writer.

The birth of the reader-writer seems like a happy thing. Everyone gets to play. Readers get to be writers. They can check their stats daily, hourly, by the minute, to see how popular their writing is. There’s no denying the narcissism in it. Looking at your stats is like looking in a mirror. It’s only a problem if it happens too often. It often does. But that is to be expected. Narcissism is the first effect of extension by technology, so McLuhan tells us. It’s the hype phase of a new technology. It is the period in which we sense our identity has been extended in some powerful way.

What is this reader-writer? What are the implications? Another name for Web 2.0 is the read-write web. Early on, it was difficult for non-technical sorts to publish to the web. Now it is easy. It has been observed that people do not keep diaries anymore. We yield up our interior life to the web. What am I reading now? What page am I on? I can’t believe the main character just did that! It is as if there is an inner camera uploading to the web, offering a map of our mind.

Ray Kurzweil is a futurist, who believes it is possible to fashion an artificial intelligence, ultimately superior to human intelligence. In his book, The Age of Spiritual Machines (referenced previously), Kurzweil provides a blueprint for building one. A starting point is reverse engineering the human mind. Sound tough? Well, our reader-writer is doing just that, uploading a map of the mind to the web. Perhaps it’s for the robots after all. [diabolical laughter]

Wikipedia (2009). The death of the author. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_the_author.

Wikipedia (2009). Post-structuralism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-structuralism.