@Cervantes & Cía. 2.0: El tecnocuerpo cervantino en la red social. Apropiaciones, rescrituras, usurpaciones, imposturas, simulaciones varias y el editor cyborg.

Abstract

In the feld of History of Literature the possibility of developing fctitious avatars in social networks allows anyone to play with canonical authors’ identity, biographical data and textual works. Such virtual identities already exist in many current social networks—and are used for and addressed towards a diversity of goals by their creators (both individual and corporate ones). Twitter, as an open feld to the culture of a freely-chosen avatar, collects voices which refect the historical character of an author based on the ofcial culture we inherited from and author or, at the same time, shows voices loosely based on particular traits of an author to create derivative characters. Therefore, we can fnd multiple different —even opposite— identities associated to one single name, who is reinterpreted by his virtual counterparts in a series of rewritings and appropriations, from simulation to imposture. Furthermore, the use of hashtags named as authors’ names as a way to generate real time publications based on a particular author’s related content brings the social network’s algorithm to be considered as a cyborg-publisher driven by an artifcial intelligence empowered by human provided content. Around this game of appropriations, several questions arise: Who are behind those identities and what kind of users create them? What are the goals of these embodied appropriations and how does this activity affects the canonical identity of an author and its traditional spaces of dissemination? I will analyse the example of the multiple avatars of national Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes under a rich theoretical framework based on the concepts elaborated by Daniel Escandell on how avatars work, by Katherine Hayles on the post-humanist landscape, by Vicente Luis Mora on the reader as spectator, by Espen Aarseth on cybertext, by Joseph Grigely on textualterity, and by Fernando Broncano on the concept of cyborg.