The Death of Authorship on the Internet

With the internet being almost a necessity when it comes to our everyday lives, the notion of authorship becomes somewhat of a difficult term to define when it comes to the accessibility and free-reign of the web. How do we define what is ours and what is not if everything can be distributed and altered without interruption? Does this make anything truly original?

             
Authorship can be defined in its simplest form as the act of creating a piece of work. So in this sense, if someone takes something which has previously been creating and make any sort of alteration it can technically be considered their work as well. With redistribution, P2P and remixes being commonplace in an online sphere, it’s no wonder authorship becomes lost in the process.

            
To sum up Michel Foucault’s thoughts, he believes that the term of one’s “work” is hard to define and original ideas are non-existent. You cannot create something truly new because everything has been used at some point or another. This ties in to the internet because the work and the author must be connected, but if nothing is original then who’s to say that work isn’t theirs as well?

      
Mackenzie Wark brings up how intellectual property has caused information to be placed in chains in a world where information can be transferred easily and quickly. This means that authorship and the idea of individuality are stopping us from creating an informed world as intellectual laws hinder our knowledge and distribution of it at times.

             
A participatory culture is one we are in currently which allows anyone to openly participate via the internet either in a large or small scale way. This means that anyone can become an ‘author’ just by using available material and either changing it to your own or redistributing it.

             
Even major journalism chains have used other journalists writing  on their own sites bringing up the question of what is considered plagiarism and what is just reusing. Are there consequences for these actions? Does this mean even trusted news sources are no longer original either?

             
In our digital age, authorship is almost entirely dead despite intellectual laws which may say otherwise due to the ease of access of knowledge and through social media like Facebook or Twitter someone’s work can be redistributed quickly and effortlessly across the web causing the individual who may have originally conceived it to be lost in the process. At this point it is probably best for us as a society to drop the idea of authorship as it limits our access of knowledge and attempts to create an individualized society which goes against everything the internet has to offer us.

Will Citizen Media Eliminate Professional News Sources?

With the rise of citizen media and citizen journalism through social media and our use of the internet for receiving information at an exceptionally fast rate, it really begs the question: is professional news becoming obsolete?

Twitter is probably the best example of citizen media because it is fast and to the point and through recent events like Hurricane Sandy or even the Eaton Centre shooting (which was first reported by Blue Jays player Brett Lawrie) we've seen its potential to spread news from a wide variety of sources on a worldwide scale in so little time. But how accurate is this? And what kind of details are missing?

An article about Hurricane Sandy from a few weeks back has the author discussing how easy it was to have misinterpreted information amongst the chaos of the event where a Twitter user @ComfortablySmug tried to mislead people such as by saying the New York Stock Exchange was flooded. What this shows is that by simply saying one thing that 'could' be true and without any sort of sources to back it up, Twitter makes people jump on the bandwagon and start to spread it quickly without any real idea of where it came from. CNN in particular picked this up which goes to show that even mainstream media uses social networks to aid their news.

Even though mainstream news uses these social media, it is still their job to fact check and pretty much weed through the noise to find actual information. Citizen media is good for getting a message out quickly and easily, but it often fails to offer any real insight into an event. Hence why pretty much 99% of the time you follow a major event on Twitter you won't see any specific details until it is tweeted by a mainstream news source. Mainstream media still does make mistakes however as seen with the Hurricane Sandy incident I mentioned earlier and in a more extreme case, that of the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting where the killer was wrongly identified. The picture that CNN ran was actually the shooter's brother, Ryan Lanza, which shows that since mainstream news sources try to keep up with the speed of the internet they will make mistakes.

Just because they aren't as quick as citizen journalism though doesn't mean that it is nearly obsolete. Participatory media like Twitter are great for allowing the public to become involved and give different perspectives to an event which we might never see, but at the end of the day who are you going to rely on more; the professional team with proven results and years of experience, or a 17 year old kid who just happened to be there?