Automation and Agency: An experiment

For this week’s blog response, I would like to focus on Carolyn Miller’s “What Can Automation Tell Us About Agency?” I found her article interesting and particularly relevant for my background in communication and particularly public speaking. As an undergraduate, I was a speech coach in the oral communication lab on Virginia Tech’s campus. Our lab, “CommLab,” was open to all Virginia Tech students, and its coaches were employed to offer assistance with any process of the speech: brainstorming, planning, outlining, writing, and rehearsing. Our lab was familiar with the thought experiment that Miller writes of in her article; we, in special circumstances, recorded speeches and submitted them to the appropriate professors for grading, therefore riding the student speaker of performing in front of a public audience. In her article, Miller discusses the dissonance created within this idea of an absence of audience and an automated scoring system, and she quotes her experiment respondents to display findings. I would like to highlight some of these findings, compare them to those that the Virginia Tech CommLab team found in a similar experiment, and offer additional commentary.

During the Fall 2011 and Spring 2012 semesters, VT CommLab coaches tested the overall success rate—success being defined by VT public speaking instructors according to guidelines set forth in the discipline—of a speech given by a student with 1) an audience present and 2) the absence of the audience. Both variables were tested and scored via communication lab coaches and public speaking instructors. In all of the scenarios, the experiment uncovered a common finding: The speaker does not execute public speaking, in its traditional nature, when a video camera replaces the audience. One instructor’s comments (W25) from Miller’s study reflects a similar opinion to those found in the VT experiment: “To grade via computer takes away one of the hardest parts of public speaking: the public part” (141). Although the recorded speeches in the VT CommLab were not scored via an automated system, the student speakers in the VT CommLab experiment did not perform their speeches with an audience present.

The CommLab study found that students were less likely to engage in their speech if performing it to a camera rather than an audience. By eliminating the audience, student speakers often lost sight of some important speech-making techniques, such as posture, body language, non-verbal cues, and additional speech strategies. Miller respondents mention the “‘engagement’ with audience in both writing and speaking,’ and that the “very notion of computer assessments would negate that idea” (141). The VT CommLab coaches and public speaking professors noted a significant change in student performance solely due to the presence or lack of the audience during the time the speech was performed. Miller poses a question that is relevant to the VT CommLab study: “If it’s not the literal machine—either camera or computer—that makes the mechanized audience so rhetorically objectionable, what does?” (148).

Miller suggests “that our resistance to automation is rooted in a commitment to agency” and writes the following: “The concern for agency might seem misplaced, or futile, since rhetoric under the conditions of placement testing or classroom performance strikes many of us as having minimal agentive potential” (141). She continues by listing and defining the three dimensions of rhetoric—performance, audience, and interaction—that might help understand the concept of agency.

A question that seems to scream out during Miller’s text is the following: What would Socrates say? There are themes at play within this research that he would likely have some comment about—presence vs. absence and speech vs. writing. Socrates’ beliefs regarding the idea of speech as a “performance” is also referenced in Miller’s language. She writes:

“Speaking strongly resists automation because we understand it intuitively it as a performance, meaning that it is dynamic and temporal, that it requires a living presence…speaking is understood as im-mediate, both in the sense that is happens in the instant and in the sense that it is not mediated but direct. Speaking-performance highlights the consciousness of the co-present subject and other, even as the possibility of self-consciousness and the knowability of the other come under question” (145).  

Would Socrates regard agency as a potential energy, or would he agree with Miller’s suggestion in thinking of agency “as the kinetic energy of rhetorical performance” (147)?

Sources:

Miller, Carolyn R. “What Can Automation Tell Us About Agency?” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 37.2 (2007): 137-157. Print.