Transformative processes of agency: Information technologies and the production of digitally mediated selves

Ellis, Darren; Tucker, Ian; Harper, David

Abstract

New media technologies are becoming an increasingly prominent constituent of everyday living, with their proliferation presenting new challenges to key aspects of the self, namely agency and identity. The potential recalibration of these notions comes about through new forms of agency being produced when information technologies play an increasingly powerful role in our lives. In this context agency is not something that can be reified and easily measured, or understood as solely intentional human action. Instead, agency is understood as something that comes to be as practices of life mak ing. We take up these ideas in relation to people’s experiences with information technologies. Through semi-structured interviews with members of the public from London and the South East of the UK, we analyse how information technologies potentially recalibrate people’s subjectivity through informational agency. Participants’ engagements with information technologies are more nuanced and complex than a ‘either good or bad’ distinction. This is one of the analytic foci of the paper, as information technologies, even when viewed with suspicion or as creating concern, are often willfully utilised due to the perceived benefits they can bring. We focus on the potential technologisation of identity and subjectivity through arguing that new forms of digitally mediated selves are produced when daily lives come to be defined more by information than by the flesh and blood of our bodies. We conclude by drawing attention to challenges facing our experiences, and understandings of, subjectivity brought about by the relentless informationalisation of life.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: Jan 2, 2012
• Deposit Date: Feb 7, 2023
• Journal: Culture and Society
• Print ISSN: 2029-4573
• Electronic ISSN: 2335-8777
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 3
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 9-24
• Series ISSN: 2029-4573
• Keywords: Information societies, agency, surveillance, everyday life
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/10336940
• Publisher URL: http://culturesociety.vdu.lt/2012/05/21/2012-3-1/