ALL THE POWER IN THE HANDS OF READERS? THE NEGOTIATION OF AUTHOR AND READER ROLES BASED ON EXAMPLES IN THE BLOGOSPHERE

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 15-26
Author(s):  
Marta WIĘCKIEWICZ-ARCHACKA
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Death Of The Author

This paper concerns the process of negotiating author and reader roles in the blogosphere.The starting point of this article is the theory of Roland Barthes that the death of the author isnecessary for the birth of the reader. This idea notably responds to changing relations between theauthor and the reader in the new media era. The example of the blogosphere allows us to see thatthe roles of the author and the reader are not pre-defined and the field of their “laws” is negotiated(two models of negotiations are described in this paper). In the blogosphere, which is an example ofparticipatory culture, knocking the author off his pedestal does not result in the reader replacingthe author, as R. Barthes would like. On the empty pedestal, after dumping the author, the readerdoes not appear – but communication does.

Picturing Barthes: The Photographic Construction of Authorship

2020 ◽  
pp. 97-118
Author(s):  
Kathrin Yacavone
Keyword(s):  
Visual Representation ◽  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Authorial Persona ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Death Of The Author ◽  
Theoretical Reflection

Despite his infamous thesis of the ‘death of the author’ in the 1960s, in the last decade of his life, Roland Barthes developed a conception of authorship that brings together textual and biographical realities, coining the terms biographème and biographologue to describe the relation between the author’s life and work. This was accompanied by a renewed and related interest in photography, as evidenced by his illustrated Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975) and La Chambre claire (1980). Taking this conjunction of authorship and photography as its starting point, this chapter juxtaposes Barthes’s understandings of the author with the evolving photographic iconography of his own authorial persona. It shows that theoretical reflection on authorship was already closely linked with photography and the visual representation of the writer figure in the early Michelet par lui-même (1954), before exploring how this relationship becomes more pronounced and self-reflexive in the 1970s. Analysis of photographic portraits of Barthes, focused on their iconography and style, reveals that the role photography has played in Barthes’s posthumous reception has followed its own dynamics, related to, yet transcending, his highly intentional photographic self-construction.

scholarly journals Film Costume as a Visual Narrative Element

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 92-100
Author(s):  
Jelena Vojković
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Psychological Test ◽  
Visual Narrative ◽  
Ridley Scott ◽  
Invasive Approach ◽  
Non Invasive ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Narrative Element

This research is an attempt to try to define the semiotic elements of film costumes that result with certain final feelings of the viewer. Looking through the semiotic theory of both Roland Barthes and Walter Benjamin and the specifics of (theatre and) film costume as a means of influencing the viewer and his/her thoughts, feelings and overall catharsis, the identity of a certain film has been set through an analysis of various elements. Furthermore, it has been noticed that psychological results by one observing a film can be various and lean more on known philosophical and psychological tendencies i.e. Freud’s theories or the ones of M. Merleau-Ponty or Lacan. To make it less verbatim, the example for the analysis that has been chosen is the 1982 science fiction film Bladerunner directed by Ridley Scott. With surreal messages and multi-layered meanings of its visual and audio presentation, it seemed like a perfect starting point for the research of the subconscious mind of the viewer. Finding a non-invasive approach to viewer’s impression, the costume itself could be observed both independently and in correlation with other film elements. By combining the results of all film levels via a visual psychological test by Robert Plutchik, known as Plutchik’s wheel of emotions, it is plain to see that a final impression still lies in a personal analysis. We find a prevalence of certain thoughts that lead the viewer to change his/her perception and, ultimately, to catharsis.

Authorship and Autography

PMLA ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 116 (5) ◽  
pp. 1377-1385
Author(s):  
Michael North
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Human Subject ◽  
Roland Barthes ◽  
The Status ◽  
Technological Developments ◽  
Historical Phenomenon ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Written Word ◽  
Death Of The Author ◽  
The Way

The Single Most Influential Contemporary Statement on Authorship is Still the Obituary that Roland Barthes pronounced over thirty years ago (Burke, Death 19). Partly by the stark extremity of its title, Barthes's essay “The Death of the Author” transformed New Critical distaste for the biographical into an ontological conviction about the status of language (Burke, Death 16) and in so doing made the dead author far more influential than living authors had been for some time. If authorship is now a subject of contention in the academy rather than a vulgar embarrassment, it is largely because of the way that Barthes inflated the issue in the very act of dismissing it. Though the idea that “it is language which speaks, not the author,” seems to demote the human subject (“Death” 143), it may also promote the written word, and it has been objected from the beginning, by Michel Foucault first of all, that the notion of écriture “has merely transposed the empirical characteristics of an author to a transcendental anonymity” (Foucault 120). Many later critics have agreed, and thus there have been a series of arguments, from the theoretical (Burke, Death) to the empirical (Stillinger), to the effect that the whole post-Saussurean turn exemplified by Barthes has not so much killed off the concept of the author as raised it to a higher plane of abstraction. But it may be that, approached from another angle, Barthes's essay will turn out to have its own relation to certain social and technological developments, and that these, in their turn, will help to situate the death of the author as a historical phenomenon.

Freedom to Work: The Impact off Wireless on Labour Politics

2007 ◽  
Vol 125 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-70
Author(s):  
Melissa Gregg
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
New Media ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Workplace Culture ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Labour Practice ◽  
Information Work ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Near Future

As the use of wireless communication technologies begins to settle into particular patterns, this essay considers the impact of such devices on workplace culture — particularly that of the professional middle class engaged in information work. While the study of workplace culture is usually the domain of sociology, management theory or organisational behaviour, media and cultural studies methods such as semiotic and discourse analysis, media consumption and theories of everyday life have a useful role to play in understanding how technology is marketed and subsequently used in and outside work contexts. As a starting point for this kind of approach, the paper combines an account of recent wireless advertising in Australia with research that is developing in ‘production-side cultural studies’ (Liu, 2004; Du Gay, 1997). In recognising the significance of new media technologies in contemporary labour practice and politics, it aims to move discussions beyond the notion of ‘work-life balance’ as a research endpoint to allow more variegated notions of freedom and flexibility for the workplaces of the present and near future.

Art and Archaeology

2020 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-113
Author(s):  
Michael Squire
Keyword(s):  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Classical Archaeology ◽  
Greek Sculpture ◽  
Death Of The Author

‘An anonymous product of an impersonal craft’: that is how Rhys Carpenter characterized Greek sculpture in 1960, and it's an assessment that has long dominated the field. Carpenter was challenging the traditional workings of classical archaeology, not least its infatuation with individual ‘masters’. While responding to past precedent, however, his comments also looked forward in time, heralding a decidedly postmodern turn. From our perspective in 2020, six decades after his book was first published, Carpenter can be seen to anticipate what Roland Barthes would dub the ‘death of the author’: ‘the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the author’, as Barthes put it.

Death

2020 ◽  
pp. 102-116
Author(s):  
Benoît Peeters
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Genre Conventions ◽  
Death Of The Author

Roland Barthes’s 1967 essay ‘The Death of the Author’ looms large over any attempt to argue for the renewed necessity of incorporating considerations of authorship into the study of world literature. Less than a decade after the publication of ‘Death of the Author’, however, Barthes followed up on it with an autobiography, albeit a deeply unorthodox one. In tracing the fortunes of this autobiography through subsequent editions and translations, the graphic novelist, biographer, and comics expert Benoît Peeters demonstrates how our image of an author, just like our understanding of a literary work according to Barthes’s structuralist understanding, is conditioned by unconscious and even impersonal forces. The simple decision by an editor unfamiliar with the contents of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes to exchange a cover illustration in order to make the book more closely conform to genre conventions can have devastating consequences.

Freedom to Work: The Impact of Wireless on Labour Politics

2007 ◽  
Vol 125 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-70
Author(s):  
Melissa Gregg
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
New Media ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Workplace Culture ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Labour Practice ◽  
Information Work ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Near Future

As the use of wireless communication technologies begins to settle into particular patterns, this essay considers the impact of such devices on workplace culture — particularly that of the professional middle class engaged in information work. While the study of workplace culture is usually the domain of sociology, management theory or organisational behaviour, media and cultural studies methods such as semiotic and discourse analysis, media consumption and theories of everyday life have a useful role to play in understanding how technology is marketed and subsequently used in and outside work contexts. As a starting point for this kind of approach, the paper combines an account of recent wireless advertising in Australia with research that is developing in ‘production-side cultural studies’ (Liu, 2004; Du Gay, 1997). In recognising the significance of new media technologies in contemporary labour practice and politics, it aims to move discussions beyond the notion of ‘work–life balance’ as a research endpoint to allow more variegated notions of freedom and flexibility for the workplaces of the present and near future. We feel free only because we lack the language to describe our unfreedom. — Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real

New Media in the Process of Shaping Local Democracy

2015 ◽  
pp. 2132-2153
Author(s):  
Ilona Biernacka-Ligieza
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Public Interest ◽  
Quantitative Research ◽  
Local Elections ◽  
High Turnover ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Before And After ◽  
The Media ◽  
Source Of Information

This chapter is an analysis of the voting campaigns in Poland before the local elections in 2002, 2006, and 2010. The 2002 election was chosen as the starting point of the analysis because of the following facts: 1) those were the first direct local elections for mayors/municipality heads, and 2) the number of council members was reduced by law, all of which heralded an interesting competition. The high turnover rate of candidates for councillors across different regions of Poland in 2002, 2006, and 2010 local government elections has been attributed in part to the volatility caused by greater media and public interest in council issues. Many see the media as the most effective way to get voters' attention. Voters also treat media information about candidates as a very important source of knowledge about the candidate, which helps them to vote. However, it is important to check: 1) which medium is the most popular and effective source of information for local public debate; 2) what is the quality of information being published before and after the local elections; and 3) if the “politician activity” and “society response” is only clearly visible during the elections time or maybe “local debate” develops after the election time. The chapter is based on the qualitative and quantitative research. Surveys were carried out in 2002, 2006, and 2010.

IT 4 Regime Change: Networking around the State in Egypt

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah L. Wheeler
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Internet Use ◽  
Regime Change ◽  
Media Use ◽  
The Core ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Status ◽  
Over Time

This chapter takes as a starting point Gene Sharp’s observation that, “the exercise of power depends on the consent of the ruled who, by withdrawing that consent can control and even destroy the power of their opponent” (Sharp, 1973, p. 4). While this observation applies across the three case studies at the core of this book, in the Egyptian state in particular, Internet use allowed citizens to experiment with withdrawing their consent, in ways that were destructive to the status quo over time, but subtle enough to go relatively undetected until the 25 January revolution. Having a voice, both online and off, resulted in, “the exchange of ideas, information and models” which “created an active citizenry” (Bayat, 2010, p. 247). Throughout the Egyptian case study, explanations for an empowered citizenry linked in part with new media use are considered.

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