Defense Date
11-1-2023
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Type
Master of Arts
Degree Name
Composition, Rhetoric, and Digital Media
First Advisor
Melissa Bianchi, Ph.D.
Second Advisor
Eric Mason, Ph.D.
Third Advisor
Juliette Kitchens, Ph.D.
Keywords
Agency, Ecology, Algorithms, Big Data, Speculative Modeling
Abstract
With “datafication” practices becoming more common in digital ecologies, humans have become increasingly reliant on emerging technologies and other actors that can store, comprehend, and analyze information. This thesis offers a proposed model of mediative agency to address the importance of interrogating how non-human actors interpret and make meaning from data. Mediative agents contribute to the disbursement of rhetoric, as well as our understanding of information, by granting visibility and assigning value to data. These processes effectively play a role in shaping reality through agents’ parameterization of data broadly, allowing non-human actors to take on a complex agency that can alter rhetorical trajectories. In interrogating the structures of power that contribute to the dissemination of rhetoric within digital ecologies, mediative agency acts as a speculative modeling approach that allows rhetors to theorize various functions of agency and anticipate how non-human agency might further develop as technological environments change in the immediate future.
NSUWorks Citation
Courtney Rosenthal. 2023. Parameterizing the Spillage Left Behind: Datafication, Machine Learning Algorithms, and the Question of Ecological Agency. Master's thesis. Nova Southeastern University. Retrieved from NSUWorks, . (155)
https://nsuworks.nova.edu/hcas_etd_all/155.