The term author and what a person must produce to become an author have been evolving with the development of various technologies. In the early stages of literacy, authors were seen as men of God that created texts from their genius (Burke; Nimus). As textual and information literacy progressed, authorship became seen as a creation of a product, meaning all that contributed to the publication process were a part of the authorship of a work (Rose). The privilege of print, then, overtook authorship, demanding that an author be a person with a work that is published in print that is recognized by a greater community. However, with the ever-increasing production of digital texts, there has been some push back on this definition of authorship. 

 

Digital texts change what authors look like and how authors and audience collaborate to make both texts and meaning. Roland Barthes’s conception of authorship where the writer’s authoritative power is not founded in originality, but in his ability to “mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them” (146) may become a working definition for a remixing author. Although the other may be making his or her own argument, they likely use others’ work to create some or all of their argument. This practice mirrors what students already do in traditional essays: citing scholars’ work. However, since remixing may be made up of mostly others’ work, the lines of copyright and ethical use may get blurred.

 

Rebecca Howard continues Barthes’s ideas by claiming, authorship becomes “textual production” (9), and the reader and author work together to create meaning. Authors are the producers of content and the audience and author are “always collaborating with text” (9). Although this phenomenon still occurs in traditional essays, remixing allows students to interact and find their own voice as an author. Through their interactions with various audiences they are allowed to explore their own voice that they may not have been able to discover within the confines of academic writing conventions.

 

When considering authorship, instructors and students must decide which works need to be considered for copyright usage. In his work Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid, Lawrence Lessing instead explores the changing dynamic between text and copyright as society moves to a more digital era. Internet users often share and remix content they find on the web. Copyright laws have adapted somewhat for these types of texts, but not nearly enough to make it easy for users to decide and follow correct copyright standards. Lessing argues that it is up to the creators of the text to participate in the economy of copyright. If the creator does not want to allow for remixing, he or she should create or code their texts in such a way that impedes remixing.

 

However, with the flexibility and openness of technology, authors are often choosing to interact with one another and allow for remixing. Though there are certainly those who are still copyright maximalists, the digital age is shuffling in a new generation and thought process behind the individual vs. collective creation process. Forums like blogs and interfaces with comments sections encourage a groupthink creative process. The author, then, becomes not just a single creator, but both the audience and author working together to create meaning. Although this process opens up authorship to new possibilities, it only serves to further complicate an already difficult concept for students and teachers alike: copyright.

 

Because students will probably utilize both students’ own work and the work of others, instructors must take the time to educate their students about copyright and ethical usage of these works. As Webb asserts, teaching students how to legally use these works is the most time consuming, challenging, yet one of the most important, aspects of teaching a remix project (Webb).  Copyright can be very confusing to students because of it is somewhat ambiguous with all the rules, guidelines, and subsets of usages within the umbrella term copyright. The lines of copyright are further burred because various media expect different citation styles. For example, an academic essay would need in-text citation and a works cited, but graphics created on the Internet may have attribution line or nothing at all.  Working with students to make ethical choices when using others work with their medium in mind is important to the work that they will do in the classroom as well as outside the classroom. Because students will often be creating remixed texts that are multimodal and may be completely visual arguments, instructors must be meticulous in their teachings of remixing and copyright.

 

Although copyright and authorship are difficult concepts to both teach and learn, they are well worth the time that would be spent on them when introducing a remixing project. Remixing allows students to move outside of the classroom, and the usual traditional essay, to a larger audience who have the potential to experience their works. Moving past the traditional idea of an author, students will create original texts with meaning and an intended audience that will read their new texts. Moreover, giving students the opportunity to complete a remix project gives them the opportunity to learn about copyright laws and ethical usage through hands-on work. Remixing projects allows students the opportunity to use this hands-on learning for both copyright and authorship, which will result in a better overall understanding of both concepts.

 

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Image, Music, Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.

Burke, Seán, ed. Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1995. Print.

Howard, Rebecca Moore. “Understanding ‘Internet Plagiarism.’” Computers and Composition 24 (2007): 3–15.

         MLA International Bibliography. Web. 26 Nov. 2015.

Lessing, Lawrence. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. New York: Penguin,

         2008. Print.

Nimus, Anna. “Copyright, Copyleft and the Creative Anti-Commons.” Multitudes, n.d. Web. 4 Dec. 2015.

Rose, Mark. Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993. Print.