Authors and authorship

Since the 1990s, authors have increasingly invaded the web, participating in the world of blogs and social networks and experimenting with new forms of hypermedia. Online communities and cooperatives of writers have led to an overt reconfiguration of the relationship between authorial, readerly and editorial instances. These new practices have a clear impact on the (until now poorly defined) notion of the literary institution as a scholarly institution, and in particular on the traditional editorial economic model. Faced with such mutations—which can be considered a type of editorialization—, we may be tempted to claim that the role of the author is weakening in favour of a multiplication of collective works which further challenge the institutional role of publishers. It is nevertheless possible to observe a simultaneous emergence of original writing practices online, where authorial figures depict themselves, playing with tensions between the author, the writer, the writer’s persona and the actual person. This paradox represents a starting point enabling reflection on the status of the author in the digital era, a consideration that aims to measure the real impact of new technology on the concept of authorship.