Proxy Users, Use By Proxy: Mapping Forms of Intermediary Interaction

Abstract

Within Human-Computer Interaction and Internet Studies there is a growing interest in non-users, which articulates the increasingly diverse modes of digital media engagement that slip between established categories of user/non-user, online/offline and self/other. In this paper we aim to build on these concerns and their disciplinary intersections to map emerging forms of computer interaction and social media participation that can be grouped together under the concept of proxy users -- intermediaries that act on behalf of others. This preliminary mapping work, surveying a number of research projects and studies involving the authors, begins to trace the diversity of agents, roles, contexts, and motivations of proxy users.