The Quality of Agency in the Media

Abstract

At the core of this work has been the impact and significance of agency throughout the pro-cesses of media reception and appropriation. The main aim has been to identify the concrete textual qualities and specific points of agency that facilitate the emergence and the mode of agency in different media texts. This required a broad-based literary review spanning different disciplines. Agency is not only at the heart of social action theory, but also funda-mental to pragmatism, object-related approaches to social action, psychology, and certain strands of anthropology. Due to the internationalization of research and the popularity of Akteurstheorien, such as Actor-Network Theories and the like, agency, as a scientific concept, has progressively established itself in the German speaking academic context. Most basically, action and agency have to be recognized as distinct from each other, with action referring to the actual process of acting and agency to the general ability to perform these actions (e.g. Handlungsermächtigung). Within agency lies the potential to transform, and to form a creative capacity that depends on individual and socio-cultural resources. It is the merit of practice theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu, An-thony Giddens, Michel Foucault or Hans Joas that they locate human agency within the broader context of society. Agency is thus always context related, either under-stood in terms of Bourdieus's habitus and the practical sense or Giddens' stratification model. Agency is thus neither free will nor resistance, but is dynamically linked to structure. This implies concurrently that agency is not something that is possessed automatically, but is aquired over the course of a lifetime, and distributed dispar-ately across society. Giddens emphasizes the " could have acted differently " (Gid-dens 1984: 9), indicating the contingent aspects of agency that become relevant in narra-tive aspects of media agency. While situationality and processuality are consensually recognized characteristics of agency, the notion of intentionality has been widely contested. The paradigmatic shift towards the homo symbolicus has emphasized meaning making and influence rather than intentionality. Situationality, processuality, influence and meaning making have thus been marked as core aspects of agency. It is due to George Herbert Mead and Erving Goffman that the impact of agency in the course of iden-tity formation has been further elucidated. Accordingly, agency can be conceived as a contextual mode of action that fortifies and advances the formations of our iden-tities. It is thus via agency that we perceive ourselves as subjects and construct our identity/ies. While these insights and conceptualizations from the social sciences form the basis for further investigation of agency, recent object-related approaches to S. Eichner, Agency and Media Reception, Film, Fernsehen, Medienkultur, DOI 10.1007/978-3-658-04673-6_8, © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden 2014 220 8 The Quality of Agency in the Media agency, e.g. the Actor-Network Theory coined by Bruno Latour, the theory of attribution of Raymond Werle and the acteur-fiction of Andrew Pickering have emerged. How-ever, after reviewing these approaches, only Werle's theory of attribution proved to be compatible with the basic premises of social action theory, adding a valuable insight: similar to the processes of parasocial interaction, artefacts can be treated as if they were capable of agency, though in fact, due to their lack of self-consciousness, machines and other objects cannot truly maintain social agency. Also, the anthropo-logical approach of Gell has been rejected in the course of this work, for reasons similar those for rejecting ANT. However, Gell's notion of agent/patient relations proved useful for a better understanding of the general principles of pleasure in playing video games and media use in general, where the recipient only seldom becomes the patient. The outlined theories contributed many fruitful perspectives which have been incorporated into a multidisciplinary concept and understanding of agency. From the field of psychology, Albert Bandura suggested a differentiation between distinct levels of agency – personal agency, proxy agency, and collective agency – a partitioning largely followed in my outlined concept of media agency. Bandura also introduced the aspects of self-efficacy and control, both key components of agency that have been picked up by other scholars considering video game experiences. Often used somewhat indiscriminately, self-efficacy and control can now be considered prop-erly as central features of agency which are especially salient within 'interactive' media texts. Having laid the cornerstones for a closer understanding of agency and further development of the specific understanding of media agency, two aspects were in need of clarification: the relationships between agency, interactivity and play. Both concepts have repeatedly been equated with agency, or have been conceptualized as prerequisites for agency. I argue, however, that neither interactivity nor play are equivalent with agency. While play is defined as a specific form of social action that is constituted through processes of framing which induce counterfactual 'let's pre-tend' and 'as if' modalities, interactivity has proven to be an ideologically over-loaded concept, falsely linked exclusively to specific media. However, interactivity has the potential to elicit the role of play in media texts since it specifies a specific form of participation. In order to purge the concept of interactivity of its ideologi-cal burdens, more contemporary approaches to interactivity (e.g. Kiousis 2002; McMillan/Hwang 2002) are considered that distinguish feature-oriented interactivity and perceived interactivity. Feature oriented interactivity articulates the technical potential of interactivity, while perceived interactivity describes the actual practices of media recipients. Likewise, play does not necessary lead to agency, but the ludic mode does have the potential to influence modes of agency, though it does not do so automatically, as my analysis demonstrated.