Authorship vs. Assemblage in Digital Media

Abstract

This chapter outlines an approach to complement current analyses on agencies of storytelling in digital environments. As our everyday life and meaning-making are increasingly entangled with digital platforms such as those of social media services, ways to critically examine digital media as an environment in literary theory are urgently needed – something that the existing analyses have mostly ignored. The particular point of contention in this chapter is the concept of authorship which has gone hand in hand with the understanding of authoring as a work of distinct agents, as it fails to acknowledge the ways in which human agency is entangled with more-than-human actors within digital environments. The chapter therefore explores assemblage as an alternative to authorship for conceptualizing agencies of storytelling in digital media. It is argued that assemblage enables the analysis of the platforms as affective environments based on a feedback loop of a kind: they are not only affected by our actions but, in turn, shape, and guide our agency.