Posts Tagged ‘authorship’
The Self-Construction of Public Identity (Blogging, Authorship, and Roland Barthes’s Autobiography, Part IV of IV)
This is a difficult point. To begin with, let’s return, again, to a brief description of how blogs work. So far we’ve covered the prose entries themselves and the metadata structuring the definitions and operations of those entries. There are two additional elements, mostly non-manipulable by a blogs’ readers. Those two elements are the "blog theme" which is also referred to as the visual design, and the author’s "dashboard." A blog’s author can define, change, and experiment with all sorts interface elements. She can design different combinations of colors, graphics, and layouts to create a certain atmosphere framing the experience of the blog. But she also has access to her own "dashboard," an author-only interface where she configures certain navigational elements and small applets called "widgets." It’s here at the dashboard where she structures the ways which her visitors can search for specific terms, organize entries according to categories and keyword tags she defines. At no other point in the blogging experience is it more clear to the author just how much control she does and doesn’t have over the way her readers encounter her and her work.
Barthes has always been interested in self-representation. Even from his earliest writings, Barthes was constantly working toward a theoretical and practical understanding of his own work and identity as a writer.
