Friedlander (2008)

Friedlander, L. (2008) “Authorship and Authority”. In Digital Storytelling and Mediatised Stories. Ed Lundby, K. (2008). Peter Lang: Oxford. Pp. 177-193.

Friedlander offers a digital storytelling perspective on rethinking authorship for digital stories. He gives a modernist and post-modernist view of authorship in the arts and provides three ways in which digital authorship is different from analogue authorship — thus the criteria by which to define digital authorship within digital collaborative, co-authored situations. He describes the reader-author relationship in analogue narrative as one of “active receptivity” but in digital narrative the participant instead “aggressively intervenes” in the text.

Main points:

The “author-text-reader triad” is dispersed; the actors in a digital narrative are (as Friedlander sees it) “designer-writers, programmers, users, and the computer itself”.

Friedlander defines the actors in a digital narrative as those who create the parameters of interactive processes (much as Murray (1997) similarly defines them), those that participate in it, and the inanimate (seemingly) system that makes the narrative digital. He writes: “the story emerges from the encounter… a pulsating electronic field replaces the stable text of the printed book”.

Friedlander describes the traditional “author-text-reader triad” as a reciprocal and sympathetic relationship:

“Reading is quite an intimate transaction. After all, I am inviting a stranger to enter my mind and flood It with potentially distrubing images, ideas, and events.”

“The author “gifts” me with her labour and her vision. In return, I offer trust in the author’s skill, motives, and authority.”

“The author’s voice, in particular, invites us into conversation…. We admire her skill and feel grateful that she is confiding in us, generously sharing— or rather performing— her intelligence, warmth, and imagination. Her generosity of spirit persuades us, in turn, to expend the effort it takes to listen and engage sympathetically.”

“Though the voice is authoritative, it is also familiar and confiding; it invites the reader into the relationship.”

There is a trust relationship, according to Friedlander, between the reader and the author; the text is trusted by the reader because the author’s voice is detectable in it.

We must recognise that narratives are highly contextual things.

Friendlander writes that narratives are contextual: they are related for purpose and often change depending upon the situation. He explains that new narratives forms come from times of “when societies need to articulate large-scale economic and cultural shifts.”

There are ways in which digital storytelling is truly new.

Where the modern author in modern art “yearns for centralised order” and the post-modern authorship rebelled against centralisation, is neither constraining nor institutionalised enough to provoke rebellion.

Friedlander writes,

“The digital medium, unlike the printed text, is in itself— in the way it exists and functions— pluralised, centerless, and disrupted. … The digital artists’ task is to invent new principles of narrative coherence that do not rely on the author’s shaping sensibility. The need to invent new principles of order.”

“An unstable swiftly shifting cacophony of voices that receive, transmit, alter, and create in quickly forming and dissolving collaborations. In place of the dialectical conversation of author-reader we get ephemeral, networked, multi-nodal relationships. The nonhierarchical, improvisatory, open-ended, or non-ended nature of these narratives undermines authority and ownership. In a networked world all texts can be appropriated, so the very notion of proprietary authorship becomes problematic.”

He calls digital story ‘texts’ “provisional”— as in temporary and dynamic.

Digital stories do three things that traditional stories don’t:

1. They exist as worlds rather than as isolated texts

Digital worlds are established before collaboration happens; it “means establishing a set of possible dynamic interactions that will be set in motion by different users.”

2. They are events or happenings rather than fully formed finished objects

Digital narratives don’t necessarily have to exhibit temporal limitations: they are open-ended and dynamic, they occur very often randomly.

Because in the interaction users are playing with their identity “they are equally intent on exploring and modifying themselves. Their interactions are implicated in their constructions of digital identities.”

He understands the ‘self’ of the user as Haraway (2006) does, “networked and collective selves” , an “intimate fusion of ego and alter-ego”

3. They find unity in the reader’s/user’s playful activity.

Indeed, Friedlander says that digital narrative, whilst it’s necessary that its processes are organised by an authorial voice, it’s the interaction of the user that is the “glue” of it.

He writes,

“The user’s self-authentication through this playful activity provides the structural glue that holds together the story experience…. These new roles… are responses to profound changes in the concept of individuality, identity, and community in our global world. These new roles… integrate the author into the community and make storytelling a collaborative and public act.”

He goes on to note that in the middle ages ‘auctores’ (authors) didn’t originate text but performed it; it was their authority with the performance of it that gave their trusted status.

Why it’s important for my research:

Authorship is systemic and a function of the system in which it exists.

That we cannot understand digital narrative separate from the electronic processes that display it to “the user” is very important. This is once again the form cannot be separated from content argument; media functions in a feedback of technological capability and narrative. Actor network theory certainly applies.

Trust is central to the text-reader-author relationship.

Clips are understood as ‘texts’ in documentary (Thalhofer; Bruzzi 2000). Speaking of the Zapruder film (JFK’s assassination), Bruzzi (2000) writes that it’s the authorial voice in documentary that makes the text into part of a story— that is, she argues that because the Zapruder film has been used to both show and deny that JFK’s assassination was a conspiracy, it’s inherently the bias that is injected by the journalist-filmmaker that gives the text voice. Whilst Friedlander is talking more in the context of gaming, and when discusses traditional “author-text-reader” relationship he is speaking of a novel, I don’t think it misrepresents the point to over lay it on Bruzzi’s argument.  

The point remains that the authorial voice is what makes a text live.

Story is emergent.

Friedlander uses the world “emerges” over and over again not only to describe the text that comes from digital storytelling — collaboration between the user and technology and the author, but also the identity as it emerges from play in the narrative. This confirms my instinct to look at ‘emergent narrative’ and the method for programming emergent narratives in gaming— that is setting parameters of interaction.

The “user” has the strongest role to play; identity feedback between online and offline in the form of story is very important to understanding how and why we interact online.

Friedlander says that the users are the “glue” and the catalyst for the emergence of the story.  It’s particularly interesting what he writes about YouTube interaction:

“Hybrid narrative sites that maximize the user’s sense of mastery and authorship (for example, YouTube and Second Life) are increasingly popular. These formats mix storytelling with self-display, and appeal particularly to those who feel lost in depersonalised mass media and who want their stories to be acknowledged by others.

The effect of these powerful representations of world and self is to endow the user with presence and value, to lend her actions impregnable authority to change narrative into a play of self-mastery.”

Social media interaction— the motivation to use it is resonance. Digital artist David Bausola has co-created Weavr bots on empathetic criteria, emotion based, based on an observation he made from the ReTweet function on Twitter: people ReTweet when they “empathise” in some way with a tweet.
Social media is about people, it is about our human interaction. Appropriately then, the lens with which to view and possibly even to measure social media is value based on resonance, acknowledgement, empathy.

In otherwords social media metrics based on qualification measures rather than quantification (followers, like, amount of trackbacks, site hits) is more apt.

Indeed, Friedlander’s discussion of the interplay between offline and online identity is incredibly useful. His commentary (and the other research he uses to support his argument) shows that when people engage in narrative they do so in a way that internalises the narrative, as they give and take with their own identity. He writes, “The delight in new identities is closely linked to the user’s quest for personal mastery.” And very usefully he moves beyond the gaming and role-playing context to YouTube — a manner that resembles more closely what I hope interaction will look like in my idoc.

Friedlander’s description/definition of what digital narrative is, is distinctly non-linear.

The non-linearity and indeed disruptive nature of the digital text is important because it once again shows the form and content feedback. Indeed, here, Friedlander’s triad author-text-reader is particularly useful as well because it describes a system in which narrative emerges. He asserts that it’s culturally relevant and appropriate.


Some critical thinking:

I am biased to like this article because it suits my purposes but I’m not unaware that Friedlander’s understanding of the feedback between identity and social media is distinctly positive sounding (or maybe that’s something I’m putting into the text). Authors like Sherry Turkel like to argue that that feedback can have negative consequences. There are plenty of nay-sayers, who say that social media supports fakery and inauthenticity. Though I would note in Friedlander’s defence that talking about emotional relating isn’t necessarily authenticity.