ABSTRACT
The prefix of the world "collaborative" is another seemingly simple element that carries a lot of semiotic baggage. The "co-" in "collaborative" is linked directly to the rise of Romantic notions of solo authorship, and, conversely, to the ideological and legal erasure of shared creation as the default condition for cultural expression. The adjectival suffix of "collaborative" has become equally superfluous, as the Internet in its current form doesn't merely obscure the mode of production, but actively reduces labor itself to the status of a commodity. An optimistic interpretation would be that, with the rise of Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter, the Romantic author finally met his death, and the term "collaborative" accordingly lost its frisson. In the context, "collaborative" has no meaning because Facebook is in fact the sole author of its 1.8 billion users' posts. The verb form of the word, "collaborate," emerged a little bit later, and around the turn of the century.
