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Introduction
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Before writing and submitting the essay you now
read, I found myself pondering a number of questions, questions that are
both vulgar and, in the context of a Web-based electronic publication,
largely unanswerable: what would my department chair think of an
"epublication" come evaluation time? Is it equivalent to a
published article in a print journal? If not, what is it "worth"?
How might such a publication shape my relative standing with other
academics in my field: will they think it's cool and hip? trivial and
nerdy? will they notice at all? And you -- i.e., those readers who have not
already clicked away -- are now faced with similar questions: is this an
important piece or not? Might it be useful to your ambitions, enlighten
you, perhaps even satisfy a desire or two? Or will it be yet another waste
of your time? As this is a scholarly ejournal, the value most in play here
is probably that subtle but cogent form of cultural capital known as
"repute". Just as I worry about the effect of this essay on the
development of my reputation, you are likely to consider both my reputation
(is he worth my time?) and the effect of my reputation on yours:
Will reading this essay help you keep "in the know"? Provide you
with another name or two to drop in the right circumstances? Or will a
mention of "Streeter's M/C piece" at the next conference
be a faux pas that produces only blank stares? Both you and I, in
sum, are compelled by ambition and constraints of time and energy to try to
ascertain in advance what value this text, this little event of reading and
writing, might have for us.
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Both these questions and their unanswerability
are not peculiar to on-line publication. This situation is just a subset of
the uncertainty inherent in reading and writing generally. It's now
axiomatic that readers and writers bring a dense tangle of expectations,
associations, and other preconditions to any text they approach, which in
turn profoundly shape the meanings that subsequently emerge. Those
preconditions are historical: the list of questions I just recited perhaps
owe something of their origins to the Parisian salon. And a sense
that those preconditions are laced with uncertainty and contradiction is
not unique to the unruly new world of digital publication: if
poststructuralism taught us anything, it's first, that our understanding of
the "authority" of a text, of the power of a text to command our
attention, respect, and desire, is shaped by the construction of that
abstraction we call the text's "author" (a construction that the
question "Who's this Tom Streeter character anyway?" both implies
and enacts) and second, that the process of subject construction is always
tinged with uncertainties.
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What the current proliferation of new forms and
channels of communication does do is simply make these uncertainties more
obvious. In the case of print, most of us have a reasonably firm idea of
how to make some sense of the value of a book when we pick it up (after a
year or two of college education, anyway). This is because of the combined
weight of major institutions (primarily the educational and legal systems)
and centuries of traditions of reading have made things relatively stable.
My department chair and I aren't likely to argue about what counts as a
reputable academic journal, for example, even though I doubt we could
develop a precise and mutually satisfactory definition of academic
respectability if we were asked. Yet we aren't asked, and so we go on with
our lives. With the new electronic media, we are forced to ask. The
relations between institutions, traditions, and texts are in flux, and as a
result the uncertainties that were always there, hidden behind habit, have
risen to the surface.
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In the interest of putting concerns about
meaning and authority on the Web in a little historical context, in this
essay I will describe three different modes of constructing textual
authority: Rousseaustic or romantic modes based in codes of authenticity
and a fabricated sense of unmediated personal experience,
"network" modes that presume institutional authority and
importance, and "neo-network" modes that rely on stylistic
markers to create what marketers call "edge". These three modes
by no means exhaust the many forms of existing and potential
writer/text/reader relations, but they are common to our contemporary
experience and thus form many of the background expectations that we bring
to bear in our encounters with new media. They are, in other words, what
many of us are likely to project onto the chaos of the WWW as we attempt to
make sense of it, and thus are likely to play some role in the formation of
the meanings we take away from it.
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"Rousseauistic Reading"
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Robert Darnton has suggested that the origins of
certain modern patterns of reading and writing can be traced back to the
time of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (215-56). Rousseau,
Darnton has argued, did much to "fabricate romantic sensitivity",
by "transforming the relation between writer and reader, between
reader and text". At the core of this new rhetorical situation was an
effort to put the persona of the writer in the forefront. "Instead of
hiding behind the narrative and pulling strings to manipulate the
characters in the manner of Voltaire", Darnton writes, "Rousseau
threw himself into his works and expected the reader to do the same"
(228). Rousseau encouraged his readers to approach his works as the
authentic, unmediated expression of the inner feelings of a unique human
being. Rousseau envisioned a form of art that was capable of
"communicating to those far away, without any mediation, our feelings,
will, desires" (Darnton 229). In La Nouvelle
Heloise, for example, Rousseau not only made the then-unusual gesture
of signing his own name to the novel, but made much of that fact in the
preface, insisting that a "man of integrity" should not hide
himself from the public. He furthermore insisted that "I do not want
to be considered any better than I am" (Darnton 229).
"A man of integrity", in other words, is a
man who bares his flaws, which in turn become the mark of authenticity.
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This now-familiar understanding of the nature of
reading -- Promethean authors sharing their inner struggles with their
readers -- echoes in many arenas beyond the expected ones like secondary
school literature classrooms. For example, recent scholarship on literature
and law has pointed out that notions of authorial genius persist, in often
highly contradictory ways, at the heart of intellectual property law,
principally through the law's insistence on author-originated uniqueness as
a defining trait of copyright, and even to some extent, patents. And they
are not unheard-of in academic writing. Rousseauian textual constructs were
originally contrasted with what Rousseau took as the stale, inauthentic,
contrived writing of Parisian high society; there are echoes of this aspect
of Rousseau in common criticisms of academic jargon and modishness, and to
ameliorate such criticisms it's often fashionable for us academics to adopt
some post-Rousseauian tricks in our otherwise salon-like writing.
For example, we cultivate a few elements of a unique writing
"voice", or strategically inserting a personal detail or two into
our treatises (remarkably common tropes in the more popular Web-based
intellectual journals, in my experience).
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Network Textual Authority
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Yet, today the more common imagined opposite of
Rousseauistic textuality is impersonal mass mediated communication: the
voice of corporations, networks, and state organisations. These sources do
have characteristic modes of address, which are suggested by the textual
features that have formed the mass mediated backdrop of most of our lives:
for example, newspaper mastheads that are at once grandiose and thoroughly
familiar, like the typographically retro New York Times
underlined by "all the news that's fit to print", or the
triumphant, resolute musical themes used to introduce major television
network news programs world wide. What I'm calling "network textual
authority" is sometimes embodied in particular persons (e.g., certain
major television news anchors) but is more frequently generated by all the
logos, insignia, call signs, and other trademarked sonic and visual imagery
that tell us instantly, not which person is speaking to us, but which major
institution.
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I remember well the first time I saw the New
York Times' masthead on my computer screen. Before that moment, I'd
downloaded individual 'Times articles from Lexis-Nexis in ASCII
format many times in the course of doing research, but seeing the masthead
on top of multiple columns of black-on-white justified text gave the
writing an entirely different authority for me. I was drawn into reading,
not a particular article for some particular information, but simply
"the paper". I didn't want it to answer already-formulated
questions, but wanted it to tell me what the questions were.
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The core trope here, I suspect, is to address
the audience in a way that presumes institutional importance, to
present an institution's symbols, its "persona", in a terse but
declarative tone designed not so much to persuade us that what follows
deserves our attention -- that persuasion is reserved for various
"hooks" that preview content -- but as if we already want to know
what the institution has to say and that the urgent declaration of
institutional identity is merely to make sure we are forewarned of the
coming important information: we turn on the news, pick up the paper, these
symbols assume, not because they promise something we're particularly
interested in, but because they are the news, the paper.
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The sheer fact of institutional size can be its
own message: in its early days, the BBC simply was the BBC. But the
rhetorical character of this mode of textual authority can be sensed by
moments when institutional power is threatened: as the major American
broadcast networks continue to lose audience share to the multichannel
cacophony of cable and satellite television, their network promos have
grown ever more frequent and shrill, even as the original sonic and visual
symbols are retained. And everyone in the media industry is aware of the
success of the Disney corporation's strategy of using a handful of
carefully chosen symbols -- Mickey Mouse, Snow White's castle, etc. -- to
make "Disney" much more than the name of a person or corporation.
Few actually notice whether a film was produced by Sony or Warner or
Columbia, but we all know when we're going to see a Disney film long before
we reach the cinema; the Disney logo in the promotional material and at the
beginning of the film helps set the tone and generate expectations that
then shape how we approach the text that follows.
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Network modes of address persist throughout the
media. Fantasies of "friction free" capitalism notwithstanding,
size is still more often than not its own reward in capitalism in general
and in the media industries in particular; economies of scale and the sheer
tendency of capital to accumulate are still very much with us. And even the
more liberal state apparatuses of the world can hardly resist the
temptation to occasionally engage in paternalistic communication. Gigantic
institutions will continue to seek ways to speak to us, and the
concentrations of power they embody ensure that they will have the
resources to do so. Much of the current discussion of the Web in the
business press is about efforts to extend network-style control into the
new media using "portals" and similar strategies to establish a
"major presence" (as opposed to simple availability) on the
Internet.
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Neo-Networks: "I Want My MTV"
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Efforts to extend network forms of address onto
the WWW, however, remain merely that: efforts. As of this writing, the
New York Times continues to give away its content, for fear that
charging for it might threaten the paper's still tenuous presence. In the
multichannel environments, anxiety in the major media outlets remains
high.
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This need not mean, however, that network power
and its associated modes of address are things of the past. Over the last
two decades, as ever more channels of communication have appeared in
industrialised and industrialising nations around the globe, a new set of
strategies for maintaining institutional longevity and power have emerged,
with their own characteristic modes of address. Michael Curtin has
identified what he calls "neo-networks", principally corporations
which maintain dominance not through control of channels but through the
careful cultivation of "branding". On the one hand, establishing and maintaining brand
awareness is a matter of establishing huge libraries of linked intellectual
property that can then be highly leveraged through licensing and similar
tie-in strategies. The Star Wars franchise can assume the attention of huge
future audiences with as much assurance as any old-style network outlet
ever could, even if we don't know what kind of screen or channel will bring
future episodes to audiences; the proliferation of toys, cross-licensing
and cross-promotional schemes and the like insure that nearly every child
over three in the English-speaking world (and huge numbers elsewhere) is
already familiar with the brand name, even if they've never seen any of the
films.
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On the other hand, Curtin points out,
neo-network strategies often rely on something marketers like to call
"edge". The archetype here, I think, is MTV, both in terms of
corporate strategy and in terms of the new mode of textual relations
associated with neo-networks. MTV first etched its way into American
teenage consciousness -- and thereby made itself stand out from the long
list of cable television channels that surrounded it -- with the
now-legendary advertising campaign of the early 1980s, centred on short,
often irreverent and visually distinct promos that always ended with the
tag-line, usually uttered by a rock star in close-up, "I want my
MTV". Like much advertising, the tag line invites identification,
i.e., teen viewers identifying themselves with the star and thus as the
"I". But what set it apart was that the rock star/viewer was
speaking defiantly to an imagined authority figure. The line implied an
additional addressee that was a disapproving parent: "my MTV" is
not "your TV". Viewers of the promos knew not only who the
ad was for but also who it was not for; the fact that it was not for
parents was one of its selling points.
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This is different not only from the network mode
which tends to assume a universal audience, but from straightforward niche
marketing that advertises something of interest to a particular group or
subgroup. (In fact MTV stayed with hard-edged, rebellious, male-oriented
rock and roll long after it became clear that its largest audience segment
was young adolescent girls; the macho rebelliousness of the music worked in
concert with the channel's marketing strategy even if it did not exactly
fits the tastes of its actual audience. It wasn't just marketing to a
niche, it was establishing a cultural identity.) "Edgy"
institutional communicators establish an identity for themselves and, by
extension, their audiences, based in part by articulating what they are
not: they offer their intended audience a way to draw an
"edge", socially and culturally, between itself and others. It's
a strategy that makes the typical adolescent desire for
self-differentiation from parents a model for a structure of communication.
If there's something adolescent in the tone of much of the Web and the
media generally these days, it may be more the result of neo-network modes
of address and institutional desires for differentiation than the actual
age of the audience.
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Conclusion
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As I write for and read the Web these days, I
encounter all three of these modes of textual authority on a regular basis,
and probably other modes as well. I still turn to www.nytimes.com on
occasion and read it for its authority more than for any particular
content. There are some largely Web-based journalists that I am slowly
getting to "know" as personalities, and I seek out their articles
regardless of location and sometimes catch myself wondering about the
details of their private lives, or about what they would be like as a
friend. And -- though at my age this is a little embarrassing to admit -- I
still at times seek out and respond to "edge", to sites and
writings that give me a thrill by implying that I stand apart from despised
others in the world. That all these different experiences are just a click
away from one another is indeed heady. But it's important to remember that
if the Web seems alternately sincere, grandly impersonal, and rebellious it
has as much to do with long-established habits of interpretation as it does
with anything peculiar to the Web itself. And it is within that longer-term
context that electronic journals like the one you read now will have to
establish and define their own peculiar forms of textual authority.
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Details
Darnton, Robert. "Readers Respond to Rousseau: The Fabrication of Romantic Sensitivity." The Great Cat Massacre. New York: Basic Books, 1984. 215-56.
Curtin, Michael. "Gatekeeping in the Neo-Network Era." Advocacy Groups and Prime Time Television. Ed. Suman. Praeger, 1999. Forthcoming.
---. "On Edge: Culture Industries in the Neo-Network Era." Making and Selling Culture. Ed. Richard Ohman. Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 1996. 181-202.
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Citation reference for this article
MLA style:
Thomas Streeter. "Reflections on Textual Authority beyond the Printed Page." M/C Reviews 15 Sep. 1999.
[your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/features/ejournal/authority.html>.
Chicago style:
Thomas Streeter. "Reflections on Textual Authority beyond the Printed Page." M/C Reviews 15 Sep. 1999,
<http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/features/ejournal/authority.html> ([your date of access]).
APA style:
Thomas Streeter. (1999) Reflections on textual authority beyond the printed page. M/C Reviews 15 Sep. 1999.
<http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/features/ejournal/authority.html> ([your date of access]).
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