Agglomerations, Relationality, and In-betweenness: Re-learning to Research Agency in Digital Communication

Abstract

As today’s communicative acts are usually irrevocably tied with digital technology, it is important to better understand the resulting ontological and epistemological shifts. The central claim of this article is that humans can no longer be the prime referents of research, either as pure communicators or pure audiences. Instead, research must become sensitive to relational agential flows, whereby different entities interact within ontologically flat agglomerations. For this purpose, the article develops a posthumanist account of the research process that explicitly rejects traditional anthropocentric assumptions in favor of an egalitarian framework that emphasizes relationality and, therefore, constant multidirectional change without linear paths of causation.