Third International Conference on Communication & Media Studies

Abstract

Theorizing media has as much to do with the media and how they function as the effect of these media upon the societies which use them, that question demands: who is the agent? This paper applies the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann, the German sociologist, to social media in order to interrogate the boundaries of agency in communication, and by extension, the shifting definitions of agency in inhuman systems. The boundaries of agent and action, intention and technique, and even cause and effect slip into each other in these communication circuits between data sets and users, often describing the same event. What is required, in the age of social media, is a delineation between traditional definitions of agency, and the puzzling aspects of the user, some of which hail the traditional subject, but also those vectors that surpass it, particularly in terms of the contingency of mediated, disparate realities generated by the discrete, computational requirements of algorithms in social media, and the discourse it permits. I conclude that the very nature of this medium excludes from the outset much of the nuanced and confrontational frame of discourse that we have historically associated with a “common humanity,” and requires a fundamental reconsideration of agency.