From reading Eyman’s section on Human- Computer Interaction (HCI) in “Defining and Locating Digital Rhetoric,” the word agency kept popping up in my mind. Eyman’s ideas about agency and agents in digital rhetoric really got me thinking about how communication works online. Before this class I always thought of persuasion as a one way street. Someone creates a message, and the audience just receives it. But Eyman points out that in digital spaces, both the creator and the user are agents of the message. Meaning that the meaning behind the message doesn’t just sit in the text or the website; it’s there throughout the whole interaction.
Agency is shared from the beginning to the end of the message. The website designers make choices on how things are built, like the menus, buttons, notifications, or links, and those choices steer how people use and understand them. But the user also has agency. We get to decide what to click on or what to ignore. That makes this process very interactive even though it takes time and happens on multiple different levels. It comes off as more like a conversation than a lecture where the designer just gives and the audience has no response to it. About the audience response, they don’t know what content to make to spark virality. Consumers are not just consuming content; we’re shaping it, too.
To Be Consumer and Creator
I wonder how people are going to interact with my website and how my design choice actually affects those interactions. While working on my dessert review website, I chose to keep it looking very light and airy because I wanted to replicate the feeling of walking into a bakery. When it came to my reviews, I wanted them to be funny but serious, but I do wonder, because so many people take food reviews so seriously, are the jokes or certain commentary that I make too jokey for my audience to actually take my advice? These are the types of questions that have been running through my mind of late because, yes, I did the website for a class, but I did spend months on it, and it does represent me in a sense.
Waiting on the feedback from my audience, whether it’s negative or positive, would be rewarding. Thinking about what small change in the design could I have made to change their opinion or what word choice that I picked left a negative taste in their mouth. All these interactions with the website, whether small or large, are like little cracks to see into my audience’s mind and psyche and how they interpret the world.
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