Author

Authorship is a claim of propriety. With this claim one may ascribe/identify lineage between lines of questioning/thought. One may also use authorship as a tool for organization - alphabetically. The indirect function comes when the author's clout gives traction to the text: here, the text is contextualized not by its content, but by its creator. There are myriad functions for claiming authorship, and those aforementioned are useful for distinct tasks - conducting research, organizing data, and publicity, respectively. I appreciate Barthes' note that texts exist for the destination of their meaning, rather than the origin of their thought. 

I was standing in the shower and thinking about how my birthday is coming up. Facebook had asked me, right before the shower, if I wanted to add my birthday to my profile so my friends could see it's my birthday, and wish me happy birthday. Clicked "Add birthday to profile" I did. 

When I comment on something, or when someone writes happy birthday on my wall, there is, elsewhere, another person on the other end, inputting commands into pieces of plastic or onto a tap of glass. Attribution is important in personal communication, but not for maintaining the person-centricity of the internet. Rather, it seems very common that people with recognizeable names on the internet are frequently bots, spam, are invented digital personas. The contrary is the username, invented by an individual, highlighting not just the presence of people on the internet, but the intelligence of people in the internet to invent what had not been given to them. 

My first AIM screen name was dtrez892. The only facet of it which represents me is "trez", but it exists sandwiched between to unrelated, "random" elements. The "d" was supposed to suggest the article "the," and I have no idea where 892 came from. The resulting username is only unique in that no one else had that exact combination of numbers and letters. In this, I stand alone, my digital presence is marked out by me. Someone had to come up with this unique combination of numbers and letters. It was me. (My next screen name was ptresadactyl, which I am much more proud of). 

This was also in the mid-2000's, when wifi everywhere was nowhere near assumed. Today, Facebook tells me how many mutual friends I have with those who request me - and of the 13 requests I have not accepted or rejected, only 2 have mutual friends with me (one is a fake account someone made, impersonating my cousin - three of my facebook friends accepted this fraud). 

The rest of the names are Catfish potential - <40 friends, gorgeous people, typical European names. They have populated more info into their profile than anyone ever did with AIM, but still their illegitimacy shines through. They are anyone and they are no one. 

Their existence online is to do naughty internet things (idk lol), and they lure their victims with fake friendship and sex. They are flat and one-dimensional. 

And so, online, what is required to constitute a presence? Is it merely a profile associated with your existence? Is it omnipresence? Digital youth grows exponentially - as does the author. In this, the overlap between digital presence and authorship overlap, as each grows tremendously over time in connection with the desire to understand and be understood, to place oneself in the context of other people and things, to "like" and "dislike" and "poke" and also to "wish happy birthday" I guess.