Networking - How does it change the game?

I had not really considered networking as changing the game right away, until I realized it didn’t mean networking as in facebook or with a group of people; it meant creating something that someone else creates too. Maybe I come up with the words, and someone else creates the code and someone else adds more motion, etc. It’s an odd principle to struggle with.

Multiple authorship has been happening for generations in literature, but what about when we can’t discern if it was a partnership or who was in charge? Usually, if two authors are listed, we assume they worked on the piece together, and in larger groups, many times they are listed as contributors working under a single editor. The lines haven’t always been black and white, but they have been a consistent shade of grey, but now, who is the author? How would it feel to be a co-co-co-co-author? It’s an odd field to get into…who gets the prize for the best piece?

It’s almost as if this literature is crossing over into a film genre. The writer of the film works with the director and the crew and the cast. Without one set of people, the rest of the film fails. No actor can be great without a great writer and vice versa.

Who do we put our faith in the most? Who should we pick as our guide in this crazy new literary world?

Maybe this is easier to relate to graphic novels that are made on partnerships…The author sometimes cannot be an illustrator due to lack of skill. So two people come together. In my opinion, the person who actually knows the story and what they want the frames to look like is the true author because otherwise, the pictures wouldn’t have much purpose. It’s not as if two people work completely independently in this situation. But, at the same time, a graphic novel without the pictures is, well, a novel. It loses that je ne sais quo that it gains with illustrations.

All of this computer stuff makes it a far more complicated. Now it’s not just that I am creating something, I need more people to help me complete my vision, and along the way they add their own. Is there such a thing as team-literature or team-art, because that’s what it feels like. It’s an interesting new time, and I suppose with new technologies and new ways of completion, old labels just don’t suffice anymore. It’s not that we need to know who and why, but we like to know.

As a writer/artist/etc, I like having right to my own work, and the whole issue of intellectual property kind of gets lost here. I think it will take some serious exploitation of someone’s work before any kind of line gets drawn in the sand. I don’t think we can just decide now what would be easiest, we have to wait and see how this new literary world works. It’s scary, but it could be the next great movement in literature, and I just hope to be on board with everyone else…Time to start coding…