4/4 Class Warmup Blog

Dibbel writes: "It gives me no small satisfaction to think that the system of centralized, limited-access publishing that instilled that fear in me will be dwarfed into irrelevance by a wide-open system that, via Usenet alone, already publishes the equivalent of 1000 books a day."

While I agree with his message that the internet is changing the way we view authorship, I don't completely agree with the statement that cyberspace authorship will dwarf traditional, published varieties. The internet is great because it gives us so much information, but at the same time we often have no idea who is at the other end of a post or a webpage. There is often no way to hold that author accountable or view his or her credentials. Part of what is appealing about traditional published text is that authors have to remain accountable to someone - their editors, their peers, and their readers. We know who they are and they can be questioned about their methods and data.