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At the dawn of the 2020s, computer code organises and shapes daily life around the world in increasingly profound ways. In this media studies dissertation, I examine how understandings of human agency and the technologically mediated everyday entwine in the ‘landscapes of code’. I am interested in how imaginaries of one’s own agency and that of others are constructed and stabilised in the contemporary world. I also look at how societal power structures and arrangements are produced, reproduced, and possibly challenged in the processes of constructing imaginaries of agency.

My research navigates at the intersections of critical media studies, domestication theory, and science and technology studies as well as critical software and algorithm studies. I unite these fields of research using the encoding/decoding model of the critical cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall. He presented the first version of the model in 1973, and since then it has achieved canonical status in the field of media studies. I both use and update Hall’s model in a contemporary media-technological context. In tune with Hall, I assert the importance of studying, on the one hand, how public imaginaries of agency are constructed, and, on the other hand, what imaginaries of agency ‘ordinary people’ entertain in their code-based everyday environments. I juxtapose the notion of imaginaries with Hall’s idea of ’maps of meaning’, by which he refers to the hegemonically constructed assemblages of meaning and how they are attached to societal practices. I also connect ‘maps of meaning’ to the questions pertaining to what has been called softwarization and to the increasingly networked quality of everyday life, bringing Hall’s conception into dialogue with STS scholar Sheila Jasanoff’s notion of ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’ and with philosopher Charles Taylor’s notion of ‘social imaginaries’.

The dissertation comprises an introduction and four empirical case studies that have been published as peer-reviewed research articles. The first case study examines how agency is defined in administrative-political discourse while the second focuses on how (and what kind of) agency is constructed by discursively pre-domesticating a new technological artefact in the mainstream media. In both cases, people are interpellated to accept and adopt a particular form of agency. The other two case studies shift attention to how people experience the softwarization of their daily environments and to the kinds of technology-related negotiations that occur in everyday life. The data sets in the four case studies include a strategic plan, Digital Agenda for Europe, by the European Union (case study I), news items on Google Glass from Finland’s mainstream media (case study II), focus group data on Facebook user and non-user negotiations concerning the architectural power of the platform (case study III), and interviews with avid social media users on the experiential landscapes of networked daily life, using self-tracking on ICT as a prompt. The methods of analysis include story narratology and discourse narratology, an adaptation of Hall’s encoding/ decoding model, and the application of Henri Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis.

The dissertation’s multidisciplinary, multimethod, and multidata approach illuminates the diversity and complexity of imaginaries of agency, paving the way for a more profound study of associated problems in the future. My results suggest that administrations, technological corporations, and mainstream media persuade people to adopt a form of agency that promotes increased consumption and economic growth. At the same time, the direction of technological development, the values that guide it, and questions of connectivity and infrastructural conditions disappear from sight. A similar process can be observed in my focus group and interview data when people discuss their relationships to media technology and especially to smart devices and social media.

To summarise, a key finding of my dissertation concerns the resigned sense of agency shared by people in the context of contemporary landscapes of code. Despite the sporadic negotiations and dissonances that surface in my data, it seems that people have grown accustomed to the notion that they have very little or no opportunity to influence the structures of their networked daily environments. The visions that could challenge or radically alter the sociotechnical forces that currently condition agency remain in the margins. Thus, I argue that the imaginaries of the mediatechnological landscape as ruled by the tech giants contribute actively, though not necessarily consciously, to consolidating the structures of power. Based on my findings, I contend that critical research should make visible alternatives to current modes of technology-related action and urgently develop ways to challenge people to creatively (re)imagine the kind of technology they want to live with.