The Death of the Reader: Meaning in the Era of Digital Narcissism

Roland Barthes’s famous essay on the “Death of the Author” inaugurated an intense reflection on the progressive dwindling of the importance of the traditional biographic idea of “author” in the activity of receiving and interpreting a text, especially a literary one. In the new epistemic era favored by the emergence and affirmation of structuralism, the meaning of a text was, indeed, no longer seen as stemming from an individual agency but from the social dimensions of language and culture. As digital communication is progressively supplanting many forms of non-digital meaning transmission, though, present-day semiospheres are confronted with a different scenario: on the one hand, “empirical” authors are actually becoming more and more prominent, meaning that audiences are starving for non-digital and “auratic” experiences of encounter with meaning, minding more meeting with authors, for instance, than reading their novels; on the other hand, given the easiness of meaning production with digital technology, the same cultures are going through a progressive “agony of the reader”: individuals are so intent in creating new particles of meaning, with impatient and daily frenzy, that they never become patient readers of other people’s meaning creations, especially if these challenge the instantaneousness that characterizes the contemporary digital communication. The shortness of present-day meaning creation and its lack of audience is bound to change the entire semiosphere. The essay aims at foreseeing some of these changes, pinpointing one of the main features of Narcissism in the digital era.