After reading Hayles, Wright and Murray, it became clear that the way ‘literary value’ is policed, constructed, and categorised, along with the way we read and understand these texts are undergoing a period of dramatic change. The dissolution of the virtuous, literary ‘critic’, or policing ‘publisher’, who’s academic literary knowledge form the grounding for a valuation of texts, the power of ascribing a text’s ‘value’ seems to be shifting to the consumer. With the rapid rise of texts (across various media entities) available, and lower barriers to entry for ammeter authors, what makes an ‘author’ successful, or valued, is perhaps linked to both capitalist structures (which, perhaps, drive both publishers to value certain texts above others) and cultural pallets (which are now formed by the public, not ‘high-brow’ artists). It reminded me of the perceived ‘death’ of broadcast TV, which simulated this disintegration of the coherent, cultural palate which came hand in hand with the Netflixicafion of media diets. The consumer curates their digital diet, no longer policed by broadcasters. Is this a force for good?
Literary ‘lists’ and prizes are an attempt to separate the ‘professional’ from the ‘amateur’… which books are ‘good’, or worth reading, and those which aren’t. However, even so, with the rising density of published works, and unwavering power of conglomerates (google, amazon) these are, maybe, equally unsafe from changing consumer pallets and practices. Further points to think about (which I couldn’t include):
- Amazon/ Google recommendation systems shaping consumer tastes, by ‘recommending’ books based on algorithmic taste- does this ‘lock’ people into boxes, preventing cross-disciplinary interaction?
- How does Faucault’s ‘author function’ apply here? When does someone become an ‘author’ in the digital sphere?
- How might Hayles’ discussion of ‘hyperreading’ bear on the way we read texts? Does this trickle down to affect the ways texts are produced, or published (given the consumer impact on literary value)?
