From Authorship to Authoring: Critical Literacy, Expert Users, and Proprietary Software

This essay argues that new authoring environments fundamentally change the authorship paradigm. Four kinds of critical literacy may be useful to produce computational media that responds appropriately to the larger rhetorical context of software culture. These critical literacies include not only writing code, but also learning a range of user interfaces, participating in design practices for debugging programs, and recognizing the norms of digital labor workflows and systems of credit.