Digital communication and agency

Abstract

The recent Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which personally distinguishable information wascollected without explicit permission from millions of Facebook users, once more brought intofocus the potential dangers of our now-pervasive social media use. What the scandal primarilyindicates is the unsettling idea that one’s personal information and what it reveals is open toan infrastructure capable of manipulating such information to its own ends. Despite suchdevelopments, in my experience of lecturing digital communication to students at a South Africanuniversity, there is a lack of awareness of how the technical infrastructures that makes up digitalcommunication can play a role in potentially negating our agency when using digital forms ofcommunication. And this lack of awareness is echoed in the lax global response to the CambridgeAnalytica scandal. In response, this article argues that digital space may well be antithetical tothe notion of agency through digital communication. To do so, it turns to a very specific source;the post-structural theorist, Gilles Deleuze, and his conception of digital societies of control, aswell as contemporary theoretical works that reflect his concerns over our agency within the virtualspaces we now increasingly inhabit.