I have unique problems: rhetorical agency

Automation and Agency by Miller brought up an interesting dilemma of the agent and if electronic sources can act as agents. "Since agency has traditionally been understood as a property of an agent, the decentering of the subject--the death of the author//agent--signals a crisis for agency, or perhaps more accurately, for rhetoric, since traditional rhetoric requires the possibility for influence that agency entails." Some commercials commonly seen on television play upon this fear of agency with that tag line, "If you have any problems you can talk to a real person 24 hours a day." This is meant as competitive reassurance that a product or company is superior because they offer the option that if any problem arises, a person instead of automated responses will respond to the customer. As Miller explains the public likes the idea that we are individuals and we will be treated as unique cases in each instance. Despite the fact that customer service representatives use scripted suggestions, the idea that we could have problems that no one else has and requires individual attention is somehow comforting to us. This plays on what Miller discusses performance: "behavior aimed at producing an impression on an observer but at the same time called attention to the performer's efforts to control that behavior." Without a real human being to perform to, we do not feel our needs  are being addressed. "The problem with the mechanized audience is not that it is inscrutable--audience is always inscrutable to at least some degree--but that we are unwilling to grant it such presence and therefore cannot, in an important sense, perform." (Miller)

We like to be interpellated as having problems that are within the scope of their help but they must adapt to our individual needs. As defined by Lundberg and Gunn rhetoric allows us to have freedom in decisions. If we receive responses from a computer we are no longer free to have unique needs. "Freedom demands making choices and locating responsibility in the individual who chooses; failing to make choices presumably because they are always already scripted in the illusion of agency is therefore failure to understand rhetoric and assume responsibility for one's symbolic choices." The automated responses of a computer-help system removes the responsibility of another person. Without the ability to hold other people's responsibility accountable for failure, users feel threatened that problems will not be solved.

Speaking with a real human is also commmonly available now in that many of the companies are turning to online solution systems through instant messanging. Instant messging has become popular because customers feel a sense of comfort in the conversational tone of instant messaging. "Speaking is understood as im-mediate, both in the sense that it happens in the instant and in the sense that it is not mediated but direct." (Lundberg and Gunn) Once again there is the assumption that we can express an individual problem which can be adapted to and addressed through the rhetoric of the individual on the other end of the instant messaging conversation. In a way instant messaging has bridged the gap of the bias that writing is encapsulating an issue and making it impossible to adapt. "the bias of writing is to obscure performance, kairos, and audience. Writing, as Burke might put it, essentializes temporality, just as speech temporalizes essence." (Miller)