I think that the two websites We Feel Fine and The Whale Hunt, are both interesting to look at how we define the author of a work, especially after reading The Death of the Author. Like Roland Barthe suggests, we confine the author to be the person who produced the work. However, can we really attribute the title of author to Jonathan Harris because he designed We Feel Fine and The Whale Hunt? I think that the interactive quality of these websites between the site and the user does not make that the case. Instead of there being the death of the author, I think there are multiple people who encompass that role. With these websites, the user, like the reader, can also be seen as an author alongside Johnathan Harris.
In The Whale Hunt, we can certainly say that Harris provides us with all the photographs from his trip. But instead of providing the user with one linear storyline, he manipulates the site, allowing the user to manipulate the story. The user can decide to view the photos through a mosaic, pinwheel, or time line form. By providing different navigations, Harris gives the user options which allow each person to view the site differently. No one will see the photos the same way. This in turn allows the users to make up their own stories. Harris goes a step further by providing constraints as well. This allows users to see photos with only Ron or Cat for example. They restrict their view of the story by certain concepts, context, or cadence which will provide all the users with different stories. Because of this, I think that the users can also be seen as the authors of the story. I think this emphasizes Barthe words when he states that the text comes together “not in its origin,” from the author, “but in its destination” from the reader.
We Feel Fine adds another potential “author” to the site. There is Jonathan Harris who has created the website, and the user of the site. Constraints have been applied here as well; users can view only certain feelings, different types of weather, or gender. But the website also includes quotes that people have written on the web. They should be included as author as well.
I actually just posted a blog with pretty much the same focus as yours. That’s kind of crazy; I just noticed how similar your blog was to mine. But, I like how you were able to use The Whale Hunt as an example that gives readers more of a role in the narrative.
I’ll play the devil’s advocate here, and ask whether you really think the reader becomes the author of The Whale Hunt. Does the possibility that I can navigate through the hunt differently from someone else mean that we’ve both “authored” different versions of the text? It makes me think that the word “author” itself is too simplistic for what’s going on.
An alternative word that comes to mind is “poacher”—a concept the French scholar Michel de Certeau used to describe a kind of reading (“textual poaching”) in which the reader takes and makes use of certain parts of a text and entirely ignores others. The readers make a kind of “raid” on the text. How would that be different from “authoring” the text?