What’s Due Next?
This Week
- Tuesday (today): Keyword Agency and ancillary reading Designing Agentive Technology: AI That Works for People
- Thursday: Response post to “Agency”
Near Future
- Be sure you’re able to access Apple TV+ (either through free trial or paid subscription) to watch Watch the Sound with Mark Ronson: Episode 1: Auto-Tune
What’s Coming Up?
- Continue thinking about how you’ll use ArcGIS StoryMap to visualize the definition of a keyword of your choice from KMS and/or our class coverage
Tuesday, November 2
Reflections on Short Response Paper #2: Technology
- Use this Google Form to reflect on the experience of writing this paper (use the QR code if you’d rather)
Feedback Form for Short Response Paper #2
- Let’s discuss the results
- Any additional feedback on the assignment and the approach? How did you improve your work?
Thinking about Agency
Algorithms as Information Brokers: Visualizing Rhetorical Agency in Platform Activities (Hocutt 2019)
Designing Agentive Technology: AI That Works for People (Noessel 2017)
- What was news to you?
- What did you already know?
- What did you struggle to understand?
- What new insights did you identify?
- How might Agency be a useful approach to understanding All You Need is Kill and Edge of Tomorrow?
Visualizing Agency in a Digital Platform: Assemblage Agency
Visualizing the Agency of a Search Interface
- When you write a paper, where does agency reside?
- How do you know?
- What does this tell you about the way we think about meaning-making activities and knowledge work?
Thursday, November 4
Consider the extent to which agency may be shared with animate and inanimate objects in this fight scene clip from First Strike (1996, directed by Stanley Tong).
- What are the actants (potential actors with agency)?
- What is the relationship among actors (actants that end up agentive)?
- Where do you see agency residing in various sequences from this fight scene?
Application in the World
One definition of agency, or at least rhetorical agency, is the ability to make meaning, and possibly change, in the world. As a result, agency has a relationship with power and its location.
If agency is making (meaning, difference, etc.), then who or what has and lacks agency in today’s social, economic, political, religious, and cultural climate? We’ll draw this up on the whiteboard.
What does this network of relations suggest about agency’s origins and practice?
- Who or what has agency?
- Who or what is left out of agency?
- What is the relationship of agency to media? To culture? To identity?
- How do media address or handle agency?
- How does culture address or handle agency?
- How does identity tie into agency, especially in the information economy?