Affordances, Technical Agency, and the Politics of Technologies of Cultural Production

Abstract

Culture Digitally is a collective of scholars, gathered by Tarleton Gillespie (Cornell University) and Hector Postigo (Temple University). With the generous funding of the National Science Foundation, the group supports scholarly inquiry into new media and cultural production through numerous projects, collaborations, a scholarly blog, and annual workshops. For more information on projects and researchers affiliated with Culture Digitally, visit culturedigitally.org or follow @CultureDig).

Notes

This essay is a conversation that Tarleton Gillespie organized between Gina Neff, Tim Jordan, and Joshua

^{1 1}In an earlier iteration of this argument, I suggested that Bogost's framework “erases human agency,” a characterization that Bogost felt misread his position in Persuasive Games. In response, I offer two points of clarification. (1) Reportage games are perhaps unique in demonstrating a mode of procedural rhetoric that simulates real world scenarios without explicitly foregrounding a designer's ideological position. For the sake of this argument, I'm primarily interested in addressing these sorts of games. (2) I concede that Bogost is not claiming an actual erasure of agency—even in reportage games—but rather, I'm concerned with how such an erasure gets constructed by certain modalities of procedural rhetoric.