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Agency Happens
This intrigued me. What I had in mind was the sociological concept of agency, i.e. the ability of people to take action to further their own interests. Consider it a response to the more well-known phrase, "Shit Happens". The concept it conveys is "You make your own shit."1,2
Syntactically it looks like a bumper sticker, so I decided I'd put the following on Facebook:
Today's thought:
Agency Happens
(If you put that on a shirt and sell it I want my cut.)This amused me because here I'm contradicting the concept I'm presenting by abnegating my own agency in declining to produce and market the shirt myself.
While chortling at my cleverness I realized there's a second interpretation following the principal/agent distinction in behavioral psychology that essentially says decisions are easier to make for, and when made by, other people, as the indirection diminishes the feeling of responsibility and subsequent dithering about what to do.3 In essence, if blame can be directed towards another the shame of making a bad choice is lessened.
For that I'd have wanted something more like this:
Agency Happens
(If you put this on a shirt and sell it I want my cut.)
which is exactly what one would want to see on a shirt, both in formatting and in change of the pronoun. It might even be more understandable, as there are companies that act as agents in producing such things. But the presentation weakens the original concept, which I still like best.
Sadly, social media technology failed me in both cases because I couldn't see how to get centered or quoted material into a Facebook box in the time I had available. In fact, I'm not happy that this blogging software doesn't let me control italicization within the quote blocks.4 Nonetheless, here it all is.
1 Within structural constraints, of course, since full agency is a privilege of the dominant members of a society.↩
2 No, I'm not going to pursue the semiotics of that phrase, although it's worthy of consideration in its own right.↩
3 "Am I over-analyzing? What if I'm over-analyzing!" Yes, I thought you'd understand.↩
4 No, I'm not going to override the style sheets to do so. I've already spent too much time trying to make footnotes that I'm pretty sure won't work in the final output.↩
