The term “agency” has an aspect of mutualistic relationship between humans and technology for a shared interest of enhanced performance. Technological performance is very much reliant on human input and through an agency lens, these technologies have been modified to assist or simplify commands implemented by humans. On the positive side, agency provides a less time consuming element into the system for example an online search providing a user with suggestions based off a well revised history of searches and embedding other forms of collected data like location, time, age, sex and a variety of other factors. All these factors will provide the technology the necessary information needed to enhance and minimise options so as to suit the user’s requirements. On the other hand, the concept of agency contradicts important notions like privacy since the interchange between humans and technology may involve involuntary data collection. Reliance on agency can be a double edged sword by positively enhancing technological performance but negatively limiting human imagination and creativity due to laziness. I think that awareness about the role of agency in the human-technological relationship is fundamental in understanding how much technology has advanced over the years.
4 thoughts on “Alvin – Agency”
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This is a great explanation of what agency is and its role in the lives of humans and technology. If there was one thing I could add it would be to talk about or suggest the thought of how much power we give technology by giving it the ability of agency. Because technology cannot have agency without human interaction we are the ones who implement the agency into the technology but as technology advances and less human interaction is needed how much power are we really giving the technology.
I though your explanation of the Mutualistic relationship between agency of humans and technology was really good. Our agency with technology may be limited, however, without human agency technology wouldn’t exist. It’s interesting to look at how agency between two entities can change over time, especially with a dynamic as complex as this one.
I found your description of agency as “mutualistic” to be interesting and reminded me of our conversation in class about nails and hammers and the way they function together. Although you point out that this reliance on technology to do certain work may make humans lazier, I think it is also possible that such reliance could positive. I’d like to believe that there are certain things only humans can do with their unique powers, such as empathy and creativity. Therefore a certain amount of human effort is wasted by working on tasks on which a computer or piece of technology would be more efficient. Reliance on agents to get more work done could theoretically free up humans to do the kinds of work which only humans can do.
I agree that in the case of agency, technological performance is reliant on human input and adapts to assists humans. Minimizing the the search results to provide the best options that match the user’s requests can be positive aspect of agency; however, I also see this as a restriction of knowledge. Instead of receiving all the information available relating to a search, the user is only provided what the technology personalizes for them. This agency can be compared to a person who only receives their news from one news outlet. Instead of looking at other reliable sources, they are only gaining information that they enjoy and not the full story.