Power and agency in online reading
| Type of publication: | Misc |
| Citation: | 227 |
| Year: | 2005 |
| Month: | 2 |
| Note: | Carusi 23-25 February 2005 - Power and agency in online k, 27.05.2007 |
| URL: | http://www.malts.ed.ac.uk/ice2... |
| Abstract: | Power is embedded in meaning systems - not only, of course, but significantly so. A meaning system comprises both what is explicitly said or stated and what is not, and any thorough analysis of power needs to attend carefully to both, and to the relation between them. Power is as much embedded in the setting, structure and organisation of an utterance (spoken or written), in its context and discourse, and in all the figures which rhetoricians have traditionally categorised and analysed, as it is in the deliberate intention to have one's own way as a speaker, persuader or bully. The ability to resist power in the World Wide Web and in hypertext requires interpretational and evaluative skills on the part of students which are attuned to the way power works in these meaning systems. In addition, it requires a particular conception of oneself as a reader. Against this background, the paper is concerned with the relation between conceptions of agency and the awareness of power and ability to resist it in online environments. For the purposes of this paper, an agent is taken to be an individual who has the capacity to act on the basis of purposes of which she is aware, purposes which are subtended by her implicit or explicit self-understanding as an agent. Power here is understood as a mode of influencing the way in which agents act, including possibly by influencing their self-understanding. Reading and interpretation are taken to be actions (or rather activities), as is the production of utterances for interpretation. After an account of the basic notions of power, meaning and agency, the paper articulates two divergent conceptions of agency, and shows how they are related to meaning and interpretational attitudes. The first is an individualist conception, according to which the reader is an autonomous individual who confronts the text as emanating from another autonomous individual (or group of such individuals). This conception of agency has often been aligned with so-called authoritarian readings, in which readers attempt to discover the intention of the producer of the text. The second conception is collaborativist-constructivist. On this conception, meaning is not a matter of the intentions of an individual, but is constructed through collaboration between individuals. This conception of agency has often been aligned with so-called non-authoritarian readings, in which no single reader holds the key to the meaning of the text. It is currently widely accepted that readings based on this conception of agency are more apt to deflecting or undermining the power of texts as they produce more critically able readers. The aim of the paper is to question this by now hegemonic view, particularly in the domain of online learning and reading. It is concluded that the distinction between the two conceptions of agency is not as clear-cut as it may appear, that the collaborativist-constructivist model shifts individualism out of view, but that the criticality for which it is lauded depends upon an understanding of agency which has many of the characteristics of the individualist conception. The paper draws upon the philosophy of criticism and interpretation, literary theory, and the work of Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jürgen Habermas. |
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| Added by: | [ADM] |
| Total mark: | 0 |
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