New Found Agencies Online

Laura Gries discusses relocating agency in a more temporal location. She is particularly concerned about the privileging of human agency. I don't particularly agree with the idea that human agency is privileged over nonhuman agency. However, I do think that the ideas she raises in her article sheds some light on how agency works online, especially when it is used by marginalized groups to shed light on their perspective and put forth they're own voice.

Gries writes, "An ecological sensibility toward agency grounds much of this important work. Especially evident in contemporary theory is the growing awareness that agency is both multidimensional and dispersed among author, audience, technologies, and environment," (67). What I find interesting here is how she discusses where agency is located. Often we think of it as in one location, often with the rhetor. However, I think it shifts, changes and is sometimes located among different agents with varying perspectives. This is where an ecological approach to studying agency can become very important. I sort of started to discuss this in a previous blog post about agency and The Walking Dead. I hope to take this a step further and look at how the internet serves as a place where agency can be multidimensional.

In particular, the internet serves as a vast ecology. For the purposes of this blog, I will look at Tumblr. A place where blogs, text, video, images, thoughts, opinions, etc collide. There are many purposes behind Tumblr and due to its nature, it is easy for various topics to come together. Feminists in particular, have taken advantage of the nature of the blogosphere to not only use their sense of agency, but convey it to others. Many times, I can come across a new found sense of agency because of the texts in these blogs. For instance, it is easy to experience a sort of cognitive dissonance in every day life when much of the make up products advertised for women don't feature women that look like you. It may not seem like a big deal, until you walk into a Target or Walgreens and realize there is no make up that matches the color of your skin. Or that you see characters white washed to fit a so called Hollywood Norm. One Tumblr blogger has had enough. Her blog is called Damn,  Lay Off the Bleach.  

Her blog is a prime example of agency because she uses this platform to point out how colorism plays out in the media. While some people think it exists in only certain communities, it is in fact very pervasive. She uses a sort of object method for tracking how colorism plays out in anime fan art. The show Avatar (not the major movie) features a dark skinned character that she frequently points out as being white washed in fan art. When people try to counter her critique with arguments about art and creative expression, she's rather merciless in her responses. This blogs serves not only as a place for the blogger to express agency, but also for others to gain a sense of agency about the cognitive dissonance they experience on a regular basis. In addition, grounding her work in objects of knowledges and tracing concrete examples makes her overall message of colorism all that more pervasive.


Examples such as these demonstrate how rhetoric operates on a daily basis in the so called "real world". For us studying rhetoric, its sort of easy to see. But the idea of using objects as a way to ground rhetoric could be one that helps transform the field so that outsiders can see it as valid. Gries writes at the end of her article, "Yet, as I have attempted to illustrate here, discourse is a vital, material force, and if studied from a new materialist perspective, we actually have more basis to account for how actancy unfolds with time via intra-actions between and non-human entities," (88).