Agency

For a long time, the world was divided up into those things with consciousness, and those things without. The first list was very small, the second list huge. A lot of fields are shifting how they think about this now though.

I think a much better concept to understand all of this is the notion of agency, which has become a hot topic of research. It doesn’t carry the same human baggage as consciousness. Everything has agency in some way - the capacity to act, to force other things to react in some way.
Take this sign as an example. Who is the sign talking to, and who is talking, in the sign? I’ve always thought a workplace with a lot of signs like this is probably a dysfunctional place, because nobody is quite sure how to solve a problem, so they delegate it to a sign. The sign has agency. It may or may not actually work, so its agency may be limited.

 Image may contain: text

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Taste

One of my pet hates is the idea of 'opinion'. Opinion went from being a quite minor, useful idea to something much more sinister, and sinister not least because the bastardisation of the idea all gets carried out under the banner of incredibly noble principles. You'd be an idiot to deny that people have different opinions about things. No problem there. I guess most basically that means they don't agree on things - what music is good, what food is good, etc. If you want to use the word opinion to describe this basic fact, that people don't agree on things, then it's not a big deal. However things have progressed. Opinion has become a much bigger idea than that. Because added to "that's just my opinion" is now "it's all just a matter of opinion". Whoa there. Opinion is now not just one person's view on something, but something a lot stronger - things that people have opinions about have no value in themselves, except their great...
Read more

There is No Such Thing as The Economy

It can make the main opposing political philosophies of the day feel better to talk about liberals and conservatives, free market ideologues and nanny states, etc. But at the end of the day you wonder if the name calling really gets to the root difference between these different camps. Margaret Thatcher is often attributed with at least popularising the view that 'there is no such thing as society'. The basic assumption was that society is always just a collection of individuals, and anything bigger than an individual is in some way artificial and therefore restrictive of individual freedom. So the standard fare of a viral proliferation of shock jocks and commentators sympathetic to this point of view, of rampant and inherently inefficient bureaucracy, of the 'nanny state' intervening in all aspects of life, of family (i.e. individual) values, as opposed to public values, and so on. Interestingly while for such folk society literally doesn't exist, the 'economy...
Read more

The Medium is the Message - Part 2

Image
I suspect the readership is flat-lining here. Ah well, it was only ever for myself. A good place to start with McLuhan is his most famous phrase - "The Medium is the Message". Many at the time and since interpreted this to mean that McLuhan was saying that all communication was nonsense and you should drop any attempt at meaning. So outrageously stupid educational installations were commissioned, with flashing lights and speakers and whatever else, which supposedly would automatically educate kids if they stood in front of them and played etc. This isn't what McLuhan meant at all. The medium is the message because the distinction between a message and the communication of that message is a false one. There is no such thing as a neutral channel or communication technology that simply transfers a separate message more or less faithfully. The standard theory is shown in the image above, which I nicked from Wikipedia. There's a pre-existing sender and receiver, and some ...
Read more