The Return of the Author

"Abstract: The article transposes the text of Roland Barthes' "Death of the Author," (La Mort de L’auteur) (1968), to the arena of happenings in cyberspace, and examines the implications from the point of view of author-reader-text, active in the electronic environment. Cyberspace has become one united text (hypertext), that allows any author to add to it, and any reader to read the content. The act of reading the text from the network simulates the cyberspace hyper-text wave function collapsing by means of the reader’s submitted query. The text that was in a state of superposition throughout the network, or in Barthes’ definition "multi-dimensional space in which many and varied writings are combined and meet, and none are foremost" becomes a single peak wave function that appears on the reader’s display. Cyberspace accelerated the reading process to the speed of light, and led to a dramatic turning point of the disappearing of the traditional author, text, and reader, and the birth of the new Super-Reader-Author. This unification creates a paradigmatic shift from dualistic, Aristotelian object-subject thought, to the holistic thought of being, realized in the singularity of consciousness and connecting real space, the spiritual and cyberspace." The Return of the Author, Avi Rosen, December 2005.