Participating audiences, authorship and the digitalization of the publishing industry

Pasquali, F. (2011). Participating audiences, authorship and the digitalization of the publishing industry . Zagreb conference: "New challenges and methodological innovations in European media audience research". 7-9 April 2011.

Abstract: One of the cultural and media areas in which the issue of participation has recently emerged to full significance is the area of literature and publishing. Following the music, film and television industries, the publishing industry is in fact facing a vast renewal due to digitalization processes. Digitization has enabled the creation of a whole new “participatory”, “grassroots” publishing market which combines the so-called "self-publishing" market and digitized texts circulating outside traditional publishing circuits. At the same time grassroots storytelling and social media bring out participatory forms of online writing. Whether all these changes involve a radical redefinition of the publishing industry and the end of the “civilization of the book”, is actually up for critical debate, and caution is needed (Thompson, 2010). And yet, what is rather certain is that one of the features of the digitalization processes lies in the centrality that participating and collaborating readers are gaining. This paper suggests a recognition of the diversity of the forms of participation that are ascribed to readers in the new publishing scenario, and it will investigate whether there are elements of continuity with analytical traditions and theories of textuality and reading (e.g. reader oriented theories, semiotics, etc). The paper will also investigate how this theoretical background helps in “shaping” the emerging concept of participation in the publishing field. Secondly, this paper solicits the relationship between the author and the reader in the contemporary scene and the need to redefine (or dismiss) the Foucauldian notion of the “author-function”. The question this paper means to address, in other words, is whether and under what conditions the “participatory turn” in writing promotes the construction of a “polyphonic” co-authored, recognizable, collaborative dialogue, or rather points to a cultural landscape where “all discourses […] would develop in the anonymity of a murmur” (Foucault, 1969)