Virtually an alternative ? The medium, the message and the user experience; collective agency in digital spaces and embodied social change

This paper begins to looks at the digital realm as an alternative space of self organization; one where communities, collective agency and social change are in a co-evolving feedback loop - by design. Firstly, by outlining a methodological basis from which to address the topic, setting out why we require new methodology to understand human agency in digital space based on the concept of ‘user experience design’ (UXD). Then by giving examples from current practice, to demonstrate how UX design parameters are often unintentionally subverted in the social use of digital spaces, giving rise to a type of collective agency that would have conventionally been understood in media theory as ‘aberrant decoding’. However, it is argued that collective agency in digital space is better understood as a type of 'human noise', a bi-product of the medium of transmission, as it is as often as undesirable as it is beneficial. It is concluded that in digital space, ‘user experience’ is a part of a converged medium/message/effect transaction and proposes how to design responsibly for this, in the knowledge that engagementwith the message, via this medium, will result inembodiedsocial change