In the article “Rhetorical Agency as Emergent and Enacted,” Cooper defines rhetorical agency as “The process through which organisms create meanings through acting into the world and changing their structure in response to the perceived consequences of their actions.” (420) Meaning that everyone uses their own personal experiences to create individual meaning that can influence our actions. With this understanding of rhetorical agency, Cooper talks about the concept of free will and responsibility. Since the agency is “grounded in an individual embodiment”(440) you would think that we act with free will and our actions are always our own but Cooper argues that things like historical contexts can have impacts and can persuade our goals and ideas.
As I was reading this article as well as the “What Can Automation Tell Us About Agency” article I was thinking about when emailing or texting I am often given autofill words and responses. I know when I get an email my phone usually gives me response options that I can choose from based on what is in the email. Usually, the responses are similar to what I was already planning on saying so I will choose from them, but after reading this article it's making me consider my free will and how I have been taught to respond to situations in certain ways. I will sometimes change what I was planning on saying to what the autofill has because it's close enough and sometimes easier to just pick one of them.
Hi Alix, I enjoyed reading your analysis of rhetorical agency, in the context given, and I believe you did a good job of understanding the role rhertorical agency interacts with communication mediums. I thought it was particularly interesting how you noted that autofill was a way in which your agency may be impacted by a communication medium. A follow-up question I would pose would be: How important are the mediums through which we communicate, mainly new media technology, in establishing agency or furthermore, enabling or disabling agency? For me, I think platforms have an innate ability to influence our own ideas of what we can and cannot do with our agencies.
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