Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Who or what is the receiver of these messages?
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Who is the agent of these actions?
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And now, for the million-dollar question: Who said the following?
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
Without clear agency, the source and receiver of messages in a system are
vague and may cause both frustration and serious errors. Without clear
agency, the meaning of information may be seriously misconstrued. With-
out clear agency, things that happen are often as “magical” and fraudulent
as the light show created by
The Wizard of Oz
—and the result of acciden-
tal unmasking can be unsettling, changing (as it did for Dorothy and her
friends) the whole structure of probability and causality.
There are two primary problems involved in the vague way that agency
is often handled in human-computer interaction. The fi rst is that unclear
or “free-fl oating” agency leaves uncomfortable holes in the mimetic con-
text—holes that people can fall through into the twilight zone of system
operations. The second is that these vague forces destroy the
experience
of
agency for humans. Typically, these sorts of transactions require that people
set parameters or specify the details of a desired action in some way, but
the
form
of the transaction is one of supplication rather than cooperation;
one might as well apply to Central Services for permission to sit down (age
check). As the Cowardly Lion says, “let me at 'im”; let me confront the
source of all this bossing around, face to face. Unclear agency places the
locus of control in a place where we can't “get at it.” Even though we are in
fact
agents
by virtue of making choices and specifying action characteristics,
