ABSTRACTThis article engages with TPC scholarship that calls for increased attention to agency as distributed and interdependent. This study analyzes 320 postings in one online health forum to better understand how patients come together to collaborate with one another, distribute information, and make health decisions. I argue that viewing crowdsourced forums as agentive assemblages may help researchers explain both the agency of individual actors as well as the collective agency of groups over time.KEYWORDS: Agencyassemblagescommunityembodimentempowermentonline health AcknowledgementsThe author would like to thank Katherine Fredlund, Alexandra Russell, Elizabeth Lane, Bess Myers, William Duffy, Edward Maclin, Kimberly Hensley Owens, and Julie Homchick Crowe, as well as the two anonymous reviewers and the editorial staff at TCQ, for their kind and valuable suggestions on early drafts of this article.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.Additional informationNotes on contributorsShanna CameronShanna Cameron is a Ph.D. candidate in the Writing, Rhetoric, and Technical Communication program at the University of Memphis. Her research interests include feminist theories and practices, digital rhetorics, and the rhetoric of health and medicine. Her work has also appeared in the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication.

This article engages with recent discussions in the field of technical communication that call for climate change research that moves beyond the believer/denier dichotomy. For this study, our research team coded 900 tweets about climate change and global warming for different emotions in order to understand how Twitter users rely on affect rhetorically. Our findings use quantitative content analysis to challenge current assumptions about writing and affect on social media, and our results indicate a number of arenas for future research on affect, global warming, and rhetoric.