The essay explores alterations in authorship and readership brought about by new material conditions of textuality. The argument is that print, broadcast electronics and digital networks each construct authors and readers in different ways. I ask what are the material conditions of authors/readers today? I use Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault to frame the question of the author/reader in relation to new technologies. I contrast the analogue and the digital, the printed book with the hypertext, the classroom lecture and distance learning of the Internet, the TV image with the multi- media hypertext of the World Wide Web. In each case I explore the changed configuration of the subject. I conclude with questions about the nature of the subject in new fields of authoring/reading and connect these with implications for political theorizing.