So back when the western media were finally noticing the Tunesian and subsequent Egyptian revolutions the angle they took on it to sell to their audiences was by stressing the role Twitter and Facebook played in them, even going so far as to call them “Twitter revolutions”. Unsurprisingly, people objected to this as the actual people building the revolution where reduced to bit players in a narrative that was once again all about us and our toys. You’d think somebody as bright as Clay Shirky would get that, but instead he reduces these complaints to an abstract point about ascribing agency to inanimate objects:
Despite their affirmation of the importance of social media during the uprisings, these authors (and many others) want to assure us that their analysis remains appropriately human-centered, that they are not making the terrible mistake of describing tools as if they had some sort of agency.
But here’s the funny thing—we describe our tools as having agency all the time. This isn’t a mistake, or an accident. It’s an essential part of our expressive repertoire around technology.
[…]
What puzzles me is why we should want to avoid those phrases in the first place. What is it about communications tools that seems to arouse more anxiety about our usual, agency-encapsulating shorthand than other kinds of technologies?
His examples are not saying what he wants them to, in fact have to be deliberately misread for Shirky to be able to have his argument. So why is he doing this? Why built an argument on a technically correct yet irrelevant objection anybody can tell has nothing to do with the issue at hand? Perhaps it’s just a question of a thesis going in search of an issue to apply it to?
This is an argumenting technique quite a few academics are found off, to seize on an abstract side issue rather than to engage directly an the argument. It can be done in both good and bad faith, it’s often seen on Crooked Timber and Shirky’s post is the platonic ideal of it…