I love Twitter. Intellectually, pedagogically, I find Twitter fascinating because I think it allows an instructor to cede some power traditionally reserved for her to her students. In his 2007 book (which I love and cite as often as possible), Thomas Rickert lays out his version of post-pedagogy: a pedagogy of the act that encourages multiplicity and requires instructors to inhabit core concepts differently. Among the most important of the concepts we must begin to inhabit differently is teacher authority. In a classroom characterized by a post-pedagogy, Rickert argues, “the teacher still has power, by that power is no longer deployed toward the idealized actualization of an empowering critical consciousness in students” (168). I think Twitter can help me create another space, a digital classroom in which my students have more of the power.
Pedagogically, the tool is compelling: it allows us to create a parallel classroom that interacts more fully with the outside world. There’s no classroom door to close on Twitter; discussions are public and outsiders can (and sometimes actually do) participate in the conversation. This space is created collaboratively and becomes, to quote Sirc concerning the need to reimagine the values of the writing classroom for a digital age, an issue of “forming” (72). And the formational discussions represent, again quoting Sirc, “a serial composition of short, staccato bursts [which] seems essential as a compositional strategy for our age” (70). Both the space and the style of writing opened by Twitter compositions force me as an instructor to relate differently to my students. As Cliff Atkinson notes in Backchannel: How Audiences are Using Twitter and Social Media and Changing Presentations Forever, Twitter and other social media venues offer opportunities for affective, spontaneous writing and response not available in more traditional writing settings: “because Twitter allows you to post easily and instantly, posts can be…emotional. What someone writes in the heat of the moment may not be the same…[as in] a more considered piece of writing” (14). This spontaneity offers agentive possibilities not necessarily available outside of these technological mediums
In terms of agentive potential, what I find fascinating about social technologies like Twitter is how they simultaneously enable and are enabled by new conceptions of agency, another one of the concepts that, if we are to follow the pedagogical ethics laid out by Rickert, we must begin to inhabit differently. But how? I think the concept of networked, dependent agency offers a number of interesting theoretical opportunities here, not the least of which has to do with Latour, blackboxes, and the weakness of isolated actants. A networked conception of rhetorical agency also reveals a number of practical possibilities not available without such a conception. My readings this week advance a number of definitions of agency, but the most productive (for me at least) comes near the end of Agency in the Age of Peer Production. “Agency emerges,” the authors argue “from the interplay… [between] the dual roles of individual and communal agency…[and] the degree to which people are empowered or not empowered by their adoption or rejection of technologies” (145). The reason I find this definition so useful is that it encapsulates the necessary features of a networked agency: it attends to the non-human (the technology) and illuminates the inherent tension between the desires/needs/goals of individual actants and the role those actants play in the network at large. But this definition also attends to practicality: how people relate to technology, how these technologies alter (or not) lived experience.
But why reconsider agency at all? The problem I find with agency as something only available to embodied, autonomous human subjects is that it encourages a false sense of self; this conception of agency tells me that my actions should alter the world in some definable way. When, almost inevitably, I don’t see this kind of change, it leads to disillusionment and apathy. Networked, dependent agency, on other hand, reveals my connections to others and helps me understand that my own actions are part of an ecology, a network that can affect the world in unintended ways. An ecological model reminds me that, though I can’t necessarily perceive the impact I’ve made, I have changed my network through my action.
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