Is there an author behind this text? A literary aesthetic driven approach to interactive media

Interactive media and interpretive users

Amidst the diversity of approaches which have informed reception studies, it seems evident that audience studies is primarily interested in how meaning is produced in a mediated everyday life and through mediated practices. This focus on audiences’ reception, use of media and participation in media production, however, has perhaps neglected, or in certain cases negated, the role of the author (Fiske, 2005) in the process of interpretation in general. In this paper we argue that understanding the role of the author in the process of interpretation should not be limited to the notion of the author as a source of meaning. Needless to say, the author as a concept can embody diverse forms and can be identified or recognised through a range of characteristics and features, hence it needs to be understood as a multidimensional concept where various characteristics complement or exclude each other (Pavlíčková, 2013). An author is a signifier and authorial presence is the presence of the signifier in the text or in the audience’s mind. By questioning the forms and dimensions of the audience’s acknowledgement, whether explicit, implicit or lacking, of the authorial presence behind the text, and by examining how this presence is perceived, made use of in engaging with the media, and articulated by users/audiences, research that is interested in audiences’ interpretation and engagement with media content can be enriched by understanding one of the contextual features that co-determines the actual interpretation of a text. So ‘author’ in this case grasps the idea of the producer of texts, systems behind the text, motivations behind an interface and, indeed, the very generating structures and relations which lie behind an interface a user encounters, as our empirical instances will make clear.

This question is important for both scholarly and public policy approaches to the role of understanding in an act of communication. First, from a scholarly point of interest, communication as an act of engagement involves active reception and feedback, where an awareness of the purposes, intentions and representations within the media text has a role to play in the making of meaning. Emerging from the long history of philosophical and literary interest in interpretation, and the shorter but significant history of empirically researching interpretation for mass mediated communication, the act of interpretation is now being discussed empirically and theoretically with a particular emphasis on new media. So, note for instance Tony Wilson’s work on the hermeneutic nature of ludic activity in online interactions (e.g. Wilson, 2004, 2009; see also Das, 2011; Ytre-Arne, 2011), Sonia Livingstone’s text-reader analysis of children on SNS (2007) or Gunther Kress’s accounts of reading paths in new media (Kress, 2003; for a review of this area see Das, 2010). Likewise, articles in New Media and Society have, over the years, often approached interactive media as texts (consider Brügger, 2009; Papacharissi, 2009) and users as active interpreters (consider Wilson et al., 2003).

Away from academia, in contemporary public policy discussions of media/digital literacy, this question finds precedence, as scholars seek to figure how and if users judge, evaluate and critically question the sources of information. Note, for instance, Livingstone and Wang in their recent policy brief − ‘people generally know how broadcast media is financed. But despite mass internet use, few understand that search engines are funded by advertising’ (2011: 6) going on to say that understanding of media funding (just one instance of who or what lies behind a text) aids evaluation of content. What lies behind these discussions of users analysing, evaluating and critically judging is, we argue, the question of an imagined author, with its paired concept of authorial constructions of imagined, model or ideal readers (see for instance, Eco’s model reader, 1979). The notion of the author has received new attention within research on web 2.0 and social media where the distinction between the role of users and producers has been widely discussed (e.g. Bruns, 2008; Jenkins, 2007). These accounts deal primarily with the question of users’ participation, and the blurring distinction between users and producers (Carpentier, 2011; Ito, 2010; Jenkins, 2006; Papacharissi, 2011); or subsequently how users who generate content perceive their role as content producers and thus, what strategies they employ to approach and address their audiences (Marwick and boyd, 2011).

Differently from this last trend, in this paper, we are concerned with the author’s presence and identity as it is perceived, acknowledged and constructed by media users, and its role in building users’ trust in content as well as sources, when media users navigate the immense web of information available to them through the internet. We present illustrative instances of data from two projects with users of interactive media to ask how, if at all, they think about an author behind the text. We first delve into notions of authors and readers within the fields of literary aesthetic theory and philosophical hermeneutics. This equips us to move on to the methods and purposes of the projects we illustrate from. We then present theorised illustrations from the empirical material, keeping our focus closely on conceptual questions. We conclude the paper by arguing that this discussion holds relevance for questions asked within media literacy debates.

The author – text – reader encounter: hermeneutic considerations

In what follows we bring together perspectives on readers’ interpretation of texts from the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer and the literary aesthetics of the Constance School of Reception Aesthetics (Iser, 1974, 1978; Jauss, 1982). Reader-oriented literary theories of meaning, in their Continental form as well as their North American form, try to capture the process of interpretation, thereby also outlining textual features that limit or resource the act of reading. Wolfgang Iser focuses on expectations involved in the act of reading where, ‘the more a text individualises or confirms an expectation it has initially aroused, the more aware we become of its didactic purpose’ (1974: 278). Next, Iser says that the task of interpretation presents a ‘kaleidoscope of perspectives, preintentions, recollections. Every sentence contains a preview of the next and forms a kind of viewfinder for what is to come; and this in turn changes the ‘preview’ and so becomes a ‘viewfinder’ for what has been read’ (1974: 279). This, for Iser, is a process that involves both anticipation and retrospection. For literary texts (though, this is interesting to apply for non-fictional and non-linear texts), the act of reading is selective and the potential text is infinitely richer than any of its individual realisations. Hans Robert Jauss, who approaches reception theory from a more historical point of view, feels the aesthetic value of a text is passed on through time, and that the ‘aesthetic’ component comes from the first reading of the text that involves a comparison of this text to others. He introduces the concept of Erwartungshorizont (horizon of expectations) which is contributed to by the norms of the genre and contemporary familiar literary-historical surroundings (in essence, comparing the text to other comparable ones). While Iser draws on the phenomenological theories of art, Jauss adopts a consciously socio-historical approach.

The precursor to literary theory’s engagement with text-centred interpretation which we noted above, was the engagement with interpretation as a necessary component of life, theorised within philosophical hermeneutics, which shifted the focus from the reading of texts to making sense of actors, events, processes and outcomes in the task of being in this world (Heidegger, 1962). Gadamer, who argues that ‘understanding is always interpretation, and hence interpretation is the explicit form of understanding’ (2004: 306) ¹ draws to our attention the rather epistemological dimension of the encounter between the reader and the text (which can also be an object or an event for instance). For Gadamer, the ‘horizon’ from which someone makes sense of a text, constituted ‘prejudice’ and ‘tradition’, always formed and shaped by prior knowledge, opinions, judgements and preconceptions. It is important to understand that these are not individual concerns, but rather socially and historically determined values that can be opposed and reacted to but neither the text nor the reader can separate themselves from them. These horizons are continually formed, leading to Gadamer’s notion of the fusion of horizons. Thus, the second and any subsequent reading of the same text will never be the same as the first one, because the reader’s previous knowledge of the content changes, as well as her expectations, and so, the horizon brought into the text-reader encounter is ever changing. This argument, we suggest, can be extended from the subsequent reading of the same text to reading the same text via different media, as every medium is associated with different discourses, expectations and anticipations.

If hermeneutic theory argues against tendencies of looking for a singular meaning of the text, emergent from the author of the text and their individual psychologies, pre-dispositions and intentions, where does the author enter our discussion here? Weberman sums it up:

When we grasp the text, we do so not so much by speculation about the author’s psychology, but by tacit appeal to what it would make sense to say, given our logic and our prior understanding, about the world.

(2002: 53)

We can argue thus, that knowledge of and familiarity with the authors is established through the reader’s previous encounters with other texts. The reader’s assumptions and expectations of authorial presence contribute to the horizon of expectations (Jauss, 1982) and inform each future reading. Therefore the author does not serve as an originator of true meaning, but rather as a paratext, helping the reader to anchor the text within a particular context.

The studies: methodology

This theoretical repertoire informed the design and analysis of two parallel projects, both of which worked with new media users, but with an overarching conceptual interest in interpretation. One study builds on the tradition of audience research and qualitative research methods in order to study patterns of cross-media consumption of mediated knowledge, with a focus on internet use. Twelve participants in their late 20s and early 30s from the United Kingdom and the Czech Republic were interviewed. In most cases they did not know each other but they all shared similar characteristics as young urban professionals living in capital cities, using all sorts of media on an everyday basis, for personal as well as professional purposes. With each of them, a semi-structured interview approximately an hour long was conducted, about their cross-media consumption. The participants were asked to keep a media diary of their daily media use for a week prior to the interview session. Those diaries were not used in the subsequent data analysis, but rather they served as an initiator, or a trigger, in the interviews. The other study began with a theory-led research question that gave it its central shape. It asked: in what ways are concepts from audience reception studies useful in understanding engagement with new media? This conceptual task was pursued empirically by applying a conceptual repertoire derived from reception analysis to interviews with 60 youthful users of the online genre of social networking sites, where, using a theory-led interview guide (as discussed below), users of an online genre were interviewed using thematic categories emergent from theoretical resources to do with readers of texts. The interviews were conducted with 60 children between the ages of 12 and 18, all of whom were interviewed in their schools across Greater London. Children came from a diverse range of schools – including state schools, private schools, mixed and single gender schools, international schools, schools with a specialisation in media/design subjects, and schools with a majority of children from non-white backgrounds. Children were interviewed in pairs, at school, during ICT lessons, but away from the classroom, in an empty and quiet space.

In both projects, we veered strongly towards a theory-led agenda. Our interviews, while developing as free-flowing conversations, were led by conceptual priorities. This theory-led qualitative interview (developed fully in Hänska-Ahy and Das, 2011) was, to us, ‘an iterative process through which we move from conceptual problems to empirical questions, on to evidence and back again, showing how the interview guide establishes an ‘interpretative bridge’ between our larger questions and our methods of assembling and interpreting evidence’ (Hänska-Ahy and Das, 2011 ² ). Likewise, in analysis too, we adopted a convergence between theory-led and data-led positions. All transcripts were coded making use of a combination of a priori coding (nearer the deductive stance, with a pre-set theoretical orientation) and emergent coding (more emergent from the data itself). It is useful to clarify however, that in this paper, we do not present findings from these respective projects but rather use illustrative instances of data to think through a theoretical question. While both projects tilted towards a deductive framing with a deductive-inductive mix in research design in the sense that we balanced our interests in concepts in reception theory with the insights emergent from speaking to young people, in this instance, our empirical instances serve illustrative purposes to present a theoretical discussion of the idea of an author behind an interface.

The imagined author

As this opening quote indicates, Catherine knows, that ‘Facebook’ can figure things out. In what follows, we present our findings on perceptions of authorial presence, construction of the identity of an imagined author, expectations of the author, feelings of betrayal and how this all contributes to the placing of trust in interactive media. Our projects show that the lack of users’ familiarity with the source is replaced by the creation of an idea of authorial identity by them, which increases their ability to see the source as a set of familiar and recognisable values that can be further accepted or not, which in other words, enable them to decide whether or not to trust. Media users therefore repetitively employ their own values to establish or diminish trust in what we call ‘the imagined author’. The author can be therefore seen as one of the paratextual features (Genette, 1997), which situate the text into a particular context. We borrow Genette’s concept of paratext, which refers to those features that surround and subsequently determine understanding of the main text – e.g. name of the author, blurb on the cover of a book, review or comments. Knowledge of the presence or lack of those features determines the reader’s interpretation of the text. The author as a paratextual feature is thus brought into the text-reader encounter by the text as a part of its horizon. The imagined author, in spite of belonging to the reader’s horizon brought into the encounter, is also the result of the fusion of those two horizons – the author brought into the encounter by the text and the reader’s pre-existing understanding of the author.

Trust in the author – filters and gates

Trust is, according to Luhmann (1988), directly related to risk taking. He argues that ‘trust has to be achieved within a familiar world’, although not all things that are familiar necessarily have to be trusted. Therefore, following Luhmann, trust in the author (or a source) can be understood as a constant consideration and a reflexive awareness of the imagined author by the reader. Trust can therefore be performed in relation to information and media content, or to the author and source of the content. Trustworthiness is therefore an arbitrary, socially determined value and what is seen and understood as trustworthy is socially constructed, historically and culturally determined and changing over time.

We suggest that media brands (such as newspapers, television or radio channels, or internet websites) that are seen as familiar by media consumers may serve as either filters or gates. This form of familiarity with certain media sources can be compared to the role of ‘word of mouth’ recommendations. Filters are used with the aim of narrowing down the amount of information at hand. They are used, but also trusted, to select information that will be of interest and relevance. On the other hand, gates open up access to further information, broadening the spectrum of known and available sources of media content. Users’ familiarity with those filters or gates raises the chance that unknown content will be accessed and subsequently trusted to various extents.

For example, 27-year-old Lucie from Prague uses Myspace as a gate, in order to search for new music by looking at the fan pages of musicians that she already knows, to see who else the other fans are interested in, while 28-year-old Kelly from London uses Myspace to look up musicians that she learnt about from her friends (word of mouth), or from Radio 6 only (as we can see in the quote opening the empirical section). For Kelly, last.fm is used as a gate, whereas Jakub uses the Czech monthly magazine called Premiere as a filter for news from the film industry.

Familiarity is a key factor in the case of the internet use. The participants generally tended to use and consume media sources that are well known to them or those whose quality and relevance they have tested and proved over time.

What is rather particular in the case of accessing the text via the internet is that participants very rarely found or came across content inadvertently or randomly. It is precisely the familiarity with other media sources (other media outlets or internet services) that directs the user to the content, either in the form of a filter or a gate. These sources embody familiarity, from the users’ perspective, that is recognised through their name (brand), by specific familiar content, by their way of presenting information or by layout, and so on. There are multiple features that can make a particular media source familiar to the user, but the familiarity is always achieved through previous use, previous knowledge and therefore through prior anticipation and expectation (Iser, 1974)

An interesting example of the relation between familiarity and trust is the use of Wikipedia, the web-based encyclopaedia written by users themselves. Its use, to some degree, was mentioned by all 12 interviews in the CZ/UK study. The following example shows an interesting dichotomy between the socially shared recognition that Wikipedia is not a serious, reliable source, and notwithstanding this, its use as a source that results in the creation of values and tactics that help users to rationalise its use. Rebecca, a 30-year-old Londoner, explains:

The lack of the socially recognised value of professionalism, because Wikipedia is created by ‘other normal people’ and therefore cannot be trusted as an ‘official’ source like the Encyclopaedia Britannica, for instance, is however balanced by repetitive use and therefore familiarity with the source as such. In their eyes, the users ‘know how to use it’ and they think that they have developed appropriate strategies and mechanisms of use.

The unknown author: persistence of the author’s identity

Well-known and established brands of various media outlets carry socially recognised familiarity with them. Values associated with them are often shared and constructed across society at large, rather than a particular community or particular audience. Gitelman (2006) introduces protocols of use to make a distinction between medium as a technology and its use. These protocols are seen as ‘a vast clutter of normative rules and default conditions, which gather and adhere like a nebulous array around a technological nucleus’ (2006: 7). Like Gadamer’s horizons, Gitelman’s protocols are far from being static, they change as technology is taken up by new users, as new situations and new uses occur, as the community reacts to it, or even as public debates begin over the issue of how it should be used. They are shared among users themselves as well as between users and producers. In this section we focus on content that is mainly user-generated or emerging from unknown sources, to explore how familiarity and trust are established. In the encounter with an unfamiliar source, familiarity is achieved by the use of specific tactics and mechanisms in media consumption. These include references to features that the user estimates as being relevant and significant, just as Marek, who works for a Czech non-governmental organisation, describes how he recognises whether the web page of a particular NGO is relevant and reliable, or not, and worth returning to in future:

People create their own hierarchies of culturally and socially determined values that are retrospectively applied on the mediated content and on the source of it. When accessing user-generated content, participants used a specific system of criteria to judge and evaluate the identity and reliability of the sources and the information. A few research respondents were members of various online communities or discussion forums. Some of those communities are open only to members, for instance, Jakub is member of Nyx ³ − a Czech enclosed discussion forum. To become a member, a person has to receive an invite from an existing member. In the interview Jakub describes how he evaluates the trustworthiness of unknown sources.

Helena is a film fan and she spends a lot of time finding out which new films are being released in Prague or internationally. She is an active member of the ‘film-minded’ online community on the website csfd.cz (CzechoSlovak Film Database). It is the Czech equivalent of imdb.com (the Internet Movie Database), which offers synopses of films, reviews, comments, and information about various film personalities. It is all generated by members themselves, but is open to non-members as well (for a different perspective on this case study, see Pavlíčková, 2012).

Helena’s interview showed that the identity of the contributors (film fans) matters and that fan content is judged in a very testing manner among the participants of the community as well. Despite finding the fan content more objective, she employs the site’s features in order to evaluate and judge the reviews and reviewers.

At the csfd.cz website, each member has her own profile that is also linked to all the content that the particular member has produced so far – reviews, comments and ratings of films, etc. Moreover, members rate each other as well. On the website, charts of the most popular members can be publicly viewed, as well as the list of the most active members and the statistics of individual members – for example, how many films they have reviewed, and so on. These features are then used by other (non-)members to find content and authors that they find to be trustworthy.

The name, whether it is a handle or a real name, permits users to group together various content defined by that particular name that is available beyond this particular social networking site. The author’s name therefore creates a continuity and persistence that ties together various texts and media content. During their media use users are likely to pay attention to various authorial features – a name, an avatar, a bio, other produced texts, as well as a social reputation expressed through comments and reactions of other users (for more on this subject, see boyd and Heer, 2006). The process of constructing the identity of an imagined author is therefore a continuous process of interactions between the media user and authorial presence. Supposedly static features such as authors’ profiles are contextualised, and their meaning and significance change for the user over time. The imagined author is a part of the reader’s horizon brought as prejudice and expectation (Gadamer, 2004) into the encounter with any new content from (un)known authors, and this evolves through subsequent encounters. It is the socially and historically determined protocols of media use that also help us to navigate and understand how paratextual features frame the imagined author. The values seen as trustworthy are therefore socially negotiated as well.

In keeping with the theorisation of prejudice and traditions within philosophical hermeneutics (Gadamer, 2004), and drawing from the notions of anticipations and expectations of the author (Iser, 1974), in this section we explored how prejudices, traditions, anticipations and expectations offer useful conceptual inroads into understanding trust in what lies behind a text. In what follows, we pick up a third direction introduced previously, in our conceptual framework, which deals with the reader’s (substitute user’s) comparative understanding and analysis of any text, in its contemporary socio-historical context (Jauss, 1982).

Contextualising texts and authors

Previously we had introduced Jauss’s concept of the horizon of expectations as a useful tool with which to understand audience/user expectations of the text and the author behind the text. The acts of reading, viewing, listening and using bring to the moment of the interface (Livingstone, 2008) a range of resources. These resources emerge not only from the offerings, affordances and restrictions of textual structure but the repertoire of cultural, socio-historical and contextual resources available to the person interpreting a text. Jauss notes that the horizon of the present (the conditions within which somebody, in the here and now, interprets that which is to be interpreted) and the horizon of the past (the standards against which one compares the text one is engaging with) are always in co-existence, and one is incomplete without the other. The implication is that a literate user, in the very tasks of analysis, evaluation and critique, is not comparing the text at hand to an objective standard set elsewhere, but rather to an entire horizon of expectations and anticipations shaped by what has been experienced before and hence what shapes what is to be expected now. As we have seen, key questions to consider when thinking through the concept are around authorial presence – who is behind the text? What can be expected of those authoring the interface? How do these expectations shape one’s experience of the text? Doubtless, it is only in response to these that the tasks of trust (or scepticism), faith (or apathy), evaluation (or unawareness) and critique (or acceptance) can be understood.

Eleven-year-old Sophia speaks of how ‘some clever people’ who she does not know control Facebook and Myspace. These clever people are not people she trusts necessarily, for they ‘can hack into all the information where you live’. Similarly, 12-year-old Shakira points out how ‘Facebook knows’ everything, especially ‘the calculation about who might know whom and all of that’. This is also voiced, perhaps in clearer terms, by 12-year-old Alan, who says

If we examine this perception of authorial presence, we note how, despite the entire interface being user-generated, and despite the blurring of author and reader not only on an SNS, but also Web 2.0 as such, there persists a marked recognition of an author, the creator of the interface. Perceptions of the author differ as does the amount of trust placed in them. For some, noticeably for younger children, the author tended to be a singular, powerful figure, one regarding whom expectations were both of fear and awe (that personal data could be accessed and monitored), but also one of faith (that nobody could be rude to anybody on the interface, as somewhere someone had an eye on the whole system). For slightly older children, in their early and mid-teens, the author as a singular figure shifted rapidly to being a system, a network somewhere, fallible at times, and often noticed to be copying ideas off other systems, in competition, and yet there seemed to be varying amounts of trust placed in the system. The image of the unknown person with the big computer is replaced by an unknown and powerful system behind the text. As 14-year-old Catherine points out,

Jauss reminds us that the horizon itself is constituted by one’s experience of parallel texts and genres, bringing us close to the concept of intertextuality. Media worlds are converging, and as the children in this project have revealed, the transitions are rapid, between a games console, multiple windows traversing multiple websites, links to advertising sites, civic support groups and the core interface on which these links link to others. But also, the comparisons are nuanced – see, for instance, the diverging expectations of multiple articulations of the same genre, where many teenagers are reminded how Myspace could not be expected to be as secure as Facebook, for a range of reasons, none of which were specified at any level by the text itself but rather pieced together in comparison and interpretation.

And crucial here, is Jauss’s explanation of the link between the past of the text (consider the histories of internet experience in the lives of these children) and the presence of the recipient (consider the conversations and stories they report from the world around them). Whether what lies behind the text is critically evaluated, is judged in the context of a range of other factors which form part of its socio-historical context. The conventions of the text are understood as products of contemporary times (note the expectations of online dangers that children approach the text with), and others engaging with the site are positioned in this time and space. All of these factors determine one’s own strategies of the ways in which the self is presented in a personal profile, in constructing the image of who one’s addressee is, the expectations one can reasonably have of the text and the strategies one can put in place for problems which might need to be resolved. The horizon of expectations is intertextual, bringing together past and present socio-historical awareness, and the norms and conventions of the interface itself. In a sense, then the text acts as a mediator between ‘past experience and present expectations’ (Jauss, 1982: 377). Then, the horizon is part of practice, of identity and of shared experiences.

In comparing Facebook with Myspace and deciding that expectations of each were to be different, in expecting a protective and powerful author, or sometimes a competitive system of networks behind the interface, in proposing that these interfaces need better privacy controls in light of the times one is in, the notion of the horizon proves a fruitful one to probe out the nuances of what is anticipated from the text and also to interpret what results from engagement with it. In the context of converging media environments, where one cannot any more cluster anticipations and expectations of a single genre by the generic conventions of that genre alone, and where new genres weave together norms and affordances of pre-existing ones, Jauss and Benzinger’s articulation of the horizon for literary texts, proves interesting:

A literary work, even if it seems new, does not appear as something absolutely new in an informational vacuum, but predisposes its readers to a very definite type of reception by textual strategies, overt and covert signals, familiar characteristics or implicit allusions. It awakens memories of the familiar, stirs particular emotions in the reader and with its ‘beginning’ arouses expectations for the ‘middle and end’, which can then be continued intact, changed, re-oriented or even ironically fulfilled in the course of reading according to certain rules of the genre or type of text.

(1970: 12)

Discussion: implications for media literacy

Our two sets of interviews showed that even though no particular author is being sought, the participants still looked for markers of identity of the author or the source of the content. The ‘imagined author’ matters, not only because various sources and online genres are associated with authors with different characteristics, but because it leads to a familiarity with the particular author, which subsequently helps to build or erode trust in the source. Why and to whom should this all matter? We want to reflect on our findings with a specific focus on conversations in digital literacy, where, implicitly, anticipating, expecting and forming judgements about what lies behind the media (text) is crucial. The media literacy discussion is far from homogenous – there are worries about ‘literacies’, especially new media literacies or digital literacies. One discussion centres on the point that much about ‘digital’ is still ‘print’, not just in terms of written text being available (because by ‘print’ we must include images as well), and therefore ‘digital’ literacies do not work, in its being too exclusive a term that does not quite grasp the multimodal and multimedia nature of the media environment; or even that in the focus on the technology, there may be a danger in losing sight of the content carried by the technology. The academy is not too sure of what it means by digital literacies, with edited collections offering different approaches to the concept, still wavering around outlining a scope (see Lankshear and Knobel, 2008; Snyder and Beavis, 2004), theorists still unsure of the very prefix ‘digital’ in digital literacies (Kress, 2009). The worry over the many prefixes of literacies – cyber, digital, media, new media, techno, information, multi and so on – is rooted in a worry over technological determinism. Scholars express discomfort that these prefixes may not ultimately make much sense, and that the conversation may be hijacked over to technologies (or texts) alone (Kress, 2009; Snyder and Beavis, 2004).

But irrespective of these debates, there is consensus, that being a literate user of the media is important at individual and societal levels (see Lunt and Livingstone, 2012), and that it means, at the very least, to be critical (of what meaning is being perpetrated in the text), to be evaluative (of the voice behind the text), and to be competent (in analysis, comparisons and introspection about what lies behind the text). It is here that an understanding of users’ and audiences’ awareness of an ‘author’ behind the text is instructive – not in a sense of submitting to the intended meaning of a text but rather as an index of literacy. The various forms of (imagined) author we have presented here contribute to the argument that (perceived) authorial presence shapes media users’ ability to critically evaluate the relevance and reliability of media content (rather than functioning as an authoritative originator of the meaning); and is simultaneously shaped by the past and future encounters with texts. To recall Luhmann, who argues that ‘we know in a familiar way about the unfamiliar’ (1988: 95), the interviews revealed that respondents appropriate and approach their encounter with media content within their familiar framework. That might be in some cases seen as taking the content at face value, in other instances as being reflective, yet still the implicit search for and identification of what is familiar should be considered as a critical evaluation. Interpretation (and new media use) implicitly and explicitly involves guessing potential manipulations and authorial persuasion (consider the analysis of anticipating authorial presence here) and selecting, with creative agency, textual elements that speak (or not) to the user. So, for instance, if the conventions of a genre are being anticipated by a user as being manipulative, recognised as being persuasive, expected to intersperse ‘friend feeds’ with adverts, users, with advanced literacies may even resist that manipulation. But embedded in conventions are also the limits posed by the interface itself, and hence, the value of keeping both texts and readers/users in the same frame, for this affords a relationship of mutuality between resources/restraints in the text and the interpretative work of the user.

Our findings reveal, first, that it is crucial to acknowledge the role of authorial perception i.e. an anticipation of the creator of any branded, un-branded, user-generated, traditional, interactive or non-interactive text, in the act of reception, even when ‘reception’ is creative. This conceptual claim can be of interest in thinking through author-text-reader encounters in the everyday world – consider the case of a computer classroom where children are being taught how to read and evaluate new media content. Paralleling the notion of an ‘audience’ out there, which is an important notion to keep in mind when creating content as well as disclosing oneself online, the notion of the (perceived) author, serves a crucial function in becoming evaluative and critical users of the media. Who does one trust? How does one figure that out? How much trust is appropriate? We suggest that our findings, on perceived authors, filters and gates are all useful conceptual tools with which to think about these matters, especially, although not solely, in teaching and learning situations. Second, our findings reveal the presence of myriad strategies – of comparing and contrasting texts, and using texts as pathways to other texts as our tools of filters and gates indicate. These concepts are all useful indicators of the ways in which we become, or are, critical and evaluative users and audiences in a mediated world.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, we would like to suggest that our broader attempt in this paper is to return to hermeneutic theory to unpack people’s work with new media: in particular the five concepts of prejudice, tradition, expectations, anticipations and horizons, which are all of importance in new media research, and communication studies in the networked age especially. Amidst the diversity of exciting research that is accumulating on creativity, mobile technologies, content production, the fusion of play and work, and much else, with the proliferation of new media, these ‘old’ concerns and concepts in hermeneutics are of worth, not only as tools with which to make sense of use, but as devices with which to plan the way in which we approach the learning, teaching and practice of (new) media literacies. It seems useful therefore to keep ‘old’ theorisations of interpretive work and texts, and the seemingly ever-changing possibilities afforded by interactive technologies in the same frame, both in terms of the reasons shown above, but more importantly, as a worthwhile intellectual pursuit in researching mediated communication.