The Roles of the Author, Sub-author and Meta-author

I finally got around to following up a glowing recommendation from Dave Cormier at www.edtechtalk.com about “Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web” by David Weinberger. It looks like an interesting book. A good review (in both senses) can be found here, which includes:

…if you think you’re an architect of anything vaguely Internet-related, you should read this book.

Incidentally, you can read the book online for free at www.smallpieces.com.

But this post is not to review the book (as I have not yet read it). What interests me is some of the history of making the book. The author decided to try writing the book online – posting each day’s work to his website to get feedback and comments. This section stands out:

I received today line edits from a reader, Halley Suitt. … she has lots and lots of good and occasionally deep things to say about the topic of the chapter, sometimes anticipating where I’m heading and sometimes taking the topic down paths I hadn’t thought about. In a sense, her comments are too good; I worry about readers taking over my topic before I can be the one to have figured out how to work it out. Ego? Absolutely! This is the ego required by every act of writing, at least up until now. The writer is saying “Listen to me! I have something to say that you didn’t think of already!” What’s it going to feel like if readers anticipate the ideas I had or, worse, was planning on having? What happens if I drift out of the center of my little universe?

The idea that a reader can come to a conclusion before the author has even thought of it really intrigued me. If this is embraced, then the central author could become something of an author/editor/producer who has the intial idea and the drive and committment to set up a website and promote it, and then posts ideas, develops and moderates the community and eventually assimilates the publicly generated content into a concise, coherent form. Almost a medium through who the public write – I will label these roles as meta-author and sub-author respectively. (This brings up the question of what happens to the roles of the traditional editor and producer, but I won’t get distracted by that at the moment).

So does the role of a meta-author become irrelevant? In some cases, like Wikipedia, the central author has mostly dissappeard (although there are something like moderators/deputants for most pages). However, I think that in some productions, it is still important. In a good book, there are many characteristics (themes, structure, pacing, reinforcement, flow etc) that can span the entire book. I think that these characteristics are largely lost if a series of small peices from sub-authors are loosely joined into a book (I do realise the irony) without a cental meta-author.

I guess it could be argued that the traditional book also becomes irrelevant when there is so much information avilable on the internet. Again, I do not agree – I think there is definitely a place for story and flow that can make a book much more than the sum of its parts of knowledge.

I can understand how some people might be put off by this approach if a considerable part of their intrinsic motivation is generated from the satisfaction of creating new ideas and conceptually going places that are new (or at least novel in the knowledge of the author). In fact, I suspect most creative people (of which most authors (including myself) are a subset) are significantly dirven by this. However, it would seen an ideal meta-author would be intrinsically motivated by ideas in general (not so much creation of their own ideas), would enjoy mediation, assimilation and summarisation, and would probably be an extrovert who is energised by interaction with other people.

So it would seem that the meta-author is quite a different type of personality to a traditional author. This is an exciting possibility – that technology is unlocking a whole new class of authors – that may (with a consciousness enhanced by a sea of contributors) even be able to go where no traditional author has gone before…