SESSION 6 (1)Actor-Network Theory (ANT) What is ANT? • •There are four things wrong with ANT: The word "actor", the word "network", the word "theory" and the hyphen. • -- Bruno Latour What is ANT? •1. Like us, technologies are members of society and can have agency. •2. Society is a network, made up of more-or-less stable assemblages. So in a certain sense, ANT is not a theory of technology, it is a theory of society. Society is the question, and technology is part of the answer. Approaches to studying technology •Historians and Sociologists of technology look especially at three phases of activity and debate about a particular technology: • 1.When the innovation is under development (Bijker on the bicycle) 2. 2.Just after it comes into the consumer market (Fischer on the telephone) 3. 3.When there is some sort of breakdown or black boxing (Latour and Actor-Network Theory) From Latour: “Another way of hearing what the machines silently did and said are the accidents. When the space shuttle exploded, thousands of pages of transcripts suddenly covered every detail of the silent machine, and hundreds of inspectors, members of congress, and engineers retrieved from NASA dozens of thousands of pages of drafts and orders.” Approaches to studying technology •By contrast to Winner ‘Do Artifacts Have Politics?’ • •By contrast to Fischer’s User Heuristic • •By contrast to Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) • •Each of these is critical of technological determinism, in their own way and tone. Technology as a reflection of society •“The object does not reflect the social. It does more….” • • Technology as a reflection of society •“The object does not reflect the social. It does more….” • • •Winner: existing social biases (racism, ableism) can be further entrenched through tech design and deployment • •Fischer: social actors can develop their own uses for tech outside of what is intended by designers • •Bijker: design of tech can be explicitly guided by the social concerns of users and non-users Technology as a reflection of society? •“The object does not reflect the social. It does more…. • • • • •So what do objects do? Technology as a reflection of society? •There is a crucial difference between technological development as a social process (Winner, Fischer, Bijker) • and technologies themselves as fully-fledged members of society • Specifically, how different from winner? ANT as Critique of Sociologism: ANTs symmetrical treatment of humans and nonhumans •Rejects “the bizarre idea that society might be made up of human relations” (Latour, pg. 239) • •Alternately, “…some materials last better than others. And some travel better than others. Voices don’t last for long, and they don’t travel very far. If social ordering depended on voices alone, it would be a very local affair.” (John Law, 1994 Organizing Modernity) • •Shirley Strum and Bruno Latour on the limits of social ordering in baboon societies Sociologism….a way of thinking about what holds a society together, that assumes that something ephemeral like norms, forms of social enforcement carried out through the simple interaction between humans is all that it takes to constitute society. Delegation from humans to non-humans The consequences of delegation •When we delegate a task to a non-human, there are often far-reaching consequences: • •Who configures and implements it? •Who maintains and fixes it? •Who is able to contest it? •Who even thinks about it anymore? Delegation from humans to non-humans http://a.tgcdn.net/images/products/front/lg-go-away-tshirt.jpg Can you think of any cases of delegation gone wrong? How could the problem have been avoided? Programs and anti-programs Thinking like a network http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/4/2012/01/8e2efa3fdef8c3793a7f95f5a4c61973.jpg •U.S. Navy photo by Ryan McLearnon Tracing networks in Wikipedia •Why has Wikipedia not completely succumb to the stupidity of the crowds by now? • •Are social rules and norms enough to explain why some online spaces are full of nonsense, spam, and vandalism and others are not? Tracing networks in Wikipedia Tracing networks in Wikipedia In Summary •Attention to breakdowns (of enrollment and what they make visible) •Chains, Assemblages (of humans and nonhumans) generate effects •Symmetry between humans and nonhumans as constituting society (and both have agency) •Programs and anti-programs – material orderings are not fixed and permanent •Punctualization of smoothly functioning assemblages into black boxes Photo assignment •Photograph an artifact/entity (human or non-human) that is not in use in the way we typically expect (either broken or enrolled in an uncommon or counter-intuitive way). • •Post to our Flickr pool by Feb 12th: http://www.flickr.com/groups/2170379@N23/ or e-mail to Stuart • • Photo assignment •In the caption section answer one of these questions: • •What (missing) entities must it be enrolled with to make it what it more typically is? • •How is it enrolled in this particular case to make it what it isn’t? • • Photo assignment The social norm: don’t take up too much fridge space. The bins don’t stop anyone, but they do guide us into policing ourselves and others.