Digital communication and agency
The recent Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which personally distinguishable information was collected without explicit permission from millions of Facebook users, once more brought into focus the potential dangers of our now-pervasive social media use. What the scandal primarily indicates is the un...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
University of Johannesburg
2022-10-01
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| Series: | Communicare |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.uj.ac.za/index.php/jcsa/article/view/1585 |
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| Summary: | The recent Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which personally distinguishable information was
collected without explicit permission from millions of Facebook users, once more brought into
focus the potential dangers of our now-pervasive social media use. What the scandal primarily
indicates is the unsettling idea that one’s personal information and what it reveals is open to
an infrastructure capable of manipulating such information to its own ends. Despite such
developments, in my experience of lecturing digital communication to students at a South African
university, there is a lack of awareness of how the technical infrastructures that makes up digital
communication can play a role in potentially negating our agency when using digital forms of
communication. And this lack of awareness is echoed in the lax global response to the Cambridge
Analytica scandal. In response, this article argues that digital space may well be antithetical to
the notion of agency through digital communication. To do so, it turns to a very specific source;
the post-structural theorist, Gilles Deleuze, and his conception of digital societies of control, as
well as contemporary theoretical works that reflect his concerns over our agency within the virtual
spaces we now increasingly inhabit.
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| ISSN: | 0259-0069 2957-7950 |