Authorship and democracy in the communication in social media

Abstract

This article discusses the notions of authorship and democracy in the current context of digital social media, proposing a discursive reading. To this end, it is considered an appropriate approach to theoretical and methodological support in the French branch of the Discourse Analysis and also on the critical reading of authors in the field of Communication. The discursive reading is chosen in order to demonstrate that the senses are not homogenous, as they move across borders, sometimes hiding, sometimes letting them different meaning effects. Based on the three dimensions of the notion of author, “responsible-author”, “actor-author” and “auctor” (Maingueneau, 2010), it becomes clear that it is not enough to be the “responsible” by an utterance, neither devotes himself to the production of texts, to constitute identity of the author in a full sense, which implies consequences for the democratic principle of rights and duties. It is argued that an analysis of ways of saying in the cyberspace contributes to the legitimacy of this field as a new discursive-textual genre, constituted of various scenographies.