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Thomas Pickering, PhD candidate in Composition and Rhetoric, has been published in the latest issue of College English. His article is titled "Revisiting Our Legacy Code: Property and Agency in Web 2.0" and is now available online.

Abstract:

In this article, Pickering argues that property on the digital web has shifted from texts to platforms, and that this shift disrupts the logics that characterized writing’s initial propertization through copyright to the detriment of writers’ economic and rhetorical agency. As a result, much of the legacy code built into our cultural and disciplinary discussions of intellectual property, including the “public good” interpretation of copyright, the “frontier” narrative of the Web, and recent calls to assert writer agency by appealing to user data as intellectual property, no longer work to the advantage of writers. Pickering offers a framework for writer agency grounded in a critical theory of property in which agency is tied to the struggle against the propertization of writing technologies by a class of Silicon Valley elites. The article ends with an appeal to user-owned platforms as potential sites for resistance.

Pickering's research interests include digital writing technologies, intellectual property, and digital web cooperatives. He is working on a dissertation on textual ownership and writer agency in the age of big data and information capitalism.