7. De-authorizing

7. De-authorizing

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Many authors believe that they own their texts, that texts should rightfully be considered their intellectual property. For them, it probably seems sinful that constructive hyper-readers tend to dismiss such rights and regard texts as belonging to the public but hyper-readers sin even more grievously. By virtually reassembling texts, they dismiss the authors’ intentions by replacing them with their own, thus de-authorizing texts altogether. This phenomenon can be seen on most websites. Every link to another person’s page is an implicit act of de-authorization.13 As hyper-readers read these linked pages, they cannot keep in their minds who authored which pages. It’s like reading a Russian novel with a cast of thousands and not being able to remember which character is which. It is difficult in hyper-reading to attribute authorship to the pages being read. When hyper-readers arrive at websites, they often have no idea who may have authored the pages and in many cases the pages have no signatures and no imprimaturs.

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If style is the hallmark of the writer’s personality and a signature the legal bond of identity, then hyper-reading undercuts the personal aspects of authorship. Hypertexts are not given the same authority as printed ones because textual signatures become blurred in the unending surge of inter-textuality called the World Wide Web. The authority of a text usually depends upon the certification of its “signatured” authorship. It is assumed that a particular publisher certifies the authority of its authors on the basis of its standing (identity) in the reading community it serves. (“This must be a good book as it was published by Oxford University Press.”) As self-publishers in the world-wide vanity press known as the Web, hyper-readers publish innumerable un-authorized intertexts. Because hyper-readers are invariantly hyper-writers of one type or another, they de-author the texts they read in the process of re-authoring them. The certification process is bypassed partly because the imprimatur controlled by institutions of publication can no longer easily be bestowed on the writer’s signature. What is worse, books and essays are being torn to bits.