b. The Reader’s Agency

The writing up of comments is perhaps the only way where readers can directly respond to and engage with the journal. At this point, let us contemplate on what exactly is happening with readers. In the following sentences I talk at length on the reader’s agency, and this content may not be germane to our concern with ballad-making, though I include it here in this report for your interest. So let us indulge a reflection on the reader’s agency.

It would be redundant though to say that the reader’s commenting makes him or her into an interactive participant. Interactivity is a term used ad nauseum when describing computer-related work. As Lev Manovich rightly stresses,

[m]odern human-computer interface (HCI) is by its very definition interactive…modern HCI allows the user to control the computer in real-time by manipulating information displayed on the screen. Once an object is represented in a computer, it automatically becomes interactive. Therefore, to call computer media interactive is meaningless – it simply means stating the most basic fact about computers. (The Langauge of New Media 71)

The simple acts of clicking on a mouse or scrolling down a page are where users interact with the screen interface, and scrawling notes on the pages of a book is another kind of interactivity. Interactivity is a useless signifier broadly describing a wide variety of actions. To say that the Scalar readers commenting makes them into interactive participants approaches condescension.

Saying this glosses over a more specific operation at work: the operation of inputting a response and submitting it for the editor’s review. Only the editor can make the reader’s words visible. This operation can be compared to a supplicant beseeching the Delphic oracle for the materialization of the supplicant’s wish. But, of course, the act of submitting a comment is not a prayer. It is a response, but it is a response whose materialization depends on an editor who may or may not wish to will it into existence. And even if it were accepted, its shape and content can be further edited and emended by the editor. If the reader “interacts” with Scalar, the interaction is delimited and regulated. Manovich offers this piercing insight:

[I]nteractive media asks us to click on a highlighted sentences [sic] to go to another sentence. In short, we are asked to follow pre-programmed, objectively existing associations. Put diffidently, in what can be read as a new updated version of French philosopher Louis Althusser’s concept of ‘interpellation,’ we are asked to mistake the structure of somebody’s else [sic] mind for our own. (New Media 74)

We can just as well say that the agency of editors is as limited as the agency of readers, for the editor can only utilize the “pre-programmed” elements of Scalar. Total free agency, whether editorial or readerly, is an illusion.

What Scalar offers, however, are different types of delimited and regulated “interaction.” The comment feature is one of them. The other types are the viewing of annotations, media links, notes, and Scalar links, the navigation of tags and paths, and the exploration of visualizations. The digitally interpellated reader  becomes entangled and intertwined, as it were, with the numerous interactions Scalar offers, such that this reader is enlisted into performing various roles. The roles, for example, are the roles of commenting, path and tag navigator, and visualization explorer. The reader’s participation is a thoroughly mediated and managed activity. Instead of idealizing the audience as interactive participants, we identify them as actors summoned and invoked into performing a series of directed operations. It is important to keep this fact in mind: that there exists a hierarchy wherein editors occupy a sort of supervisory position over the subordinated reader.

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