Digital Rhetoric 03: Agencies

Today's lecture is centered on three different approaches to the concept Agency, as presented by Elisabeth Hoff-Clausen, Diane Penrod and José van Dijck. In order to understand agency, an understanding of some other related concepts such as power and personal freedom must be attained as well.

Power is here the importance of the expression of interpersonal and social relations, including the relationship between individuals, groups of individuals and the human social institutions. The opposite of power is the phenomenon of powerlessness, in this context expressed by a lack of freedom. Thus personal Freedom is the generic term for a variety of freedoms and rights, whose purpose is to ensure the individual's integrity and freedom of expression without the risk of being subjected to state regulation and coercion

Hoff-Clausen
Hoff-Clausen describes "Agency" as a theoretical concept attached to the ethos of the speaker/retor, and as closely connected to the acts of speaking. Agency in rhetorics on the Web is mentioned as a condition for individual empowerment, where the WWW becomes a democratizing medium.

"The Agency-concept has stressed that the rhetoric, with its understanding of the interplay between speaker, context and audience are able to theorize and criticize phenomena that in alternative ways is trying to enter the public debate, whether they are actual changes in the social order or actions that for some reason or another can not penetrate the "official" reality, possibly as a consequence of an oppressive rhetoric from the power centers of society"

For example, the unemployed Dane Lau blogged about his absurd experiences with the job activation system, thus creating a lot of attention on the area of activating unemployed Danes.

Penrod
Penrod uses fan-communities as a point of origin for his understanding of Agency as a ludic democracy among media users. Fan-fiction and a fan-videos uploaded to YouTube are all examples of agency activities that emphasize creativity, the subject's ability to express himself and criticize, as well as the formation of groups and communities around different themes. Central in Penrod's writings is how the users in a fan-community are both users and participants. Together with other users, they generate new knowledge and information, that is optic correct rather than political correct (Meaning that the fans create their own reality when they expand the universe of e.g. Star Wars).

Van Dijck 
Opposite Hoff-Clausen and Penrod is van Dijck, who claims that what we perceive as agency is an illusion. Instead of personal freedom, the media users are being controlled by the system. Communities are not sub-cultures, instead they are brand-communities, where the user is exploited in order to promote the medium.
It is for example the users that create, edit, criticize and discus all content on Wikipedia, so the site does not have to use money or labor on it themselves.

Todays readings:

• Hoff-Clausen, Elisabeth (2008) "Online Ethos" chap. 2
• van Dijck, José (2009) "Users like you? Theorizing agency in user-generated content"
• Penrod, Diane (2010) "Writing and rhetoric for a ludic democracy: Youtube, fandom and participatory pleasure"