Class Blog Post - "Death of the Author"

What connections do you make between Barthes' "Death of the Author" and your thinking thus far about hypertextual writing?

In Barthes' "Death of the Author", I thought it was very interesting how once writing occurs, the author loses his voice and henceforth dies. Barthes' claims that in more primitive societies, the oral storyteller was revered for his art of speech, but now with writing, the author loses his face, and the story is simply text on a page.

This can relate to hypertextual writing because this hypertext and idea of internet links can bring the reader to something new that he has never witnessed before. The reader knows not of the author of the page that a link might bring him to because this link was made at the discretion of the author of the first text the reader was glancing at. I believe that hypertext can bury the dead author even further into the ground due to the randomness of links.

Also, when I was thinking about this topic for this blog response, I thought of trying to cite websites for research. I always have the hardest time finding the author of a page. This problem makes me have a funny feeling in the back of my mind. Was there actually an author at all? Well, of course there was, but it seems as if the author is nonexistent.

There is just an odd thing about hypertext. It is so easy to create and have it accessible to people around the world, but nobody really pays attention to who the person is behind the site.