Today was probably one of the happiest days of my PhD studies and definitely the happiest day of this fall semester: I finally found out my conference paper for QQML2009 will be included in "Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Libraries. Theories and Applications". Although I was expecting good news it mentally helped to find even more "boost" or "gun powder" for spring semester. As the publisher is well-known, it will have a good classification number in ETIS (Estonian Science Information System). Actually, I wish I shouldn't think on these classification numbers, not so good for creativity. Writing, even though it is "only" scientific and therefore meant to be objective, formal, controllable etc is still involved with creativity/arts for me.
I guess I also passed the course of "Media Semiotics". It had no explicit connection with my research, I had to think about the information environment principles in Estonia. As I eventually found out it involved a great deal of thinking about how the mass media system works here. But I'm no journalist, I know nothing about it. Reading a book on press freedom and pluralism in Europe gave me some hope to find out something about Estonia. Then it turned out that the text on Estonia (written in comparison with other Baltic States) was not very correct. So I'm not very sure nor very glad about the final assignment - an essay on information environment of Estonia I had written and rewritten and rewritten. An essay that was different each time I wrote it. I was tired of this topic by the end of the course. Nevertheless, during final seminar that was held today I felt some sort of relief. Not the relief of finishing the course that had no explicit connection with my topics. It was rather a relief of obtaining a new set of tools and it was the reason why I had subscribed for that course in the first place. Media semiotics was a little bit mysterious and seductive subject for me before that course and I haven't lost my interest in it. I had felt that conventional analysis nor rhetorics is not enough for writing a good analysis or column or essay so the course actually helped me to push the limits.
In my previous post I was worrying about the commentators in local news portals. The "Media Semiotics" course provided also a solution for my problem. In "Narrative Fiction" (by Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, partly available in Google Books) there is a model in the beginning of the chapter 7. It involves real author and real reader in the ends of a continuum. But there are implied author, narrator, narratee and implied reader, all just fiction, between those real agents. Even though the commentators may be sometimes impolite they are usually barking under the wrong tree. It is the implied author whose ideas they are questioning or insulting, not the real one. But as I referred, the implied author or narrator are just existing in our heads. So the real author should at least theoretically be safe.
Theoretically - as I was just thinking about the man who was drawing the cartoon of Mohammed some years ago and that he was actually threatened. Or those journalists, real authors, who are killed annually, in hundreds of numbers. As I understand, the model presented in that book is trying to show that the real author is something different from the implied author or narrator, but for the real reader (who perhaps hasn't heard about this model?) they may all seem to be the same.
So, the more the real author is revealing his/her identity through his/her writings the more s/he may become vulnerable in front of the real reader. It would be lovely if they'd bring you flowers (although you don't eat these or are allergic) or ask you to write them a small message in your newly published publication. But what if someone wants to treat you or your family with some kind of an "accident"? I remember how some Estonian bloggers (a bit more famous than average blogger) started to protect their personal blogs with passwords. It was not only about very personal or intimate matters they wanted to protect (as you tell about these only to your closest friends) but they were probably also feeling themselves endangered somehow. One of them was revealing that fear even quite explicitly (worrying that someone may have unhealthy interest to find the author's home's location etc).
Still, I'm not contesting that model. It works probably fine for classical authors, and also today when a higher extent of anonymity is surrounding the real author. But the more the real author is leaving his or her "footprints" in the internet (in Twitter-like environments, for example) the thinner is becoming that fictional space between real author and real reader. Which may not be very pleasant.
No comments:
Post a Comment