These days, I'm slowly progressing on the self-imposed task of reading Brumo Latour's introduction to Actor-Network Theory: Reassembling the Social. Although Latour's writing style is relatively light, at least compared to other sociology theorists such as Habermas or Bordieu, I still find quite difficult to grasp all the subtilities of actors, mediators, translation, oligopticons, plug-ins...
My first experience with ANT was in a doctoral course about Technology, Economy and Society, where different theories about the interaction between technology and society, such as technological determinism or social construction of technology, were briefly described. What I found most interesting about ANT, and differentiating to other theories and frameworks, was the role it gives to non-human actors.
Society and Technology Studies have always struggled to accommodate the mechanisms in which technological artifacts and society interact and shape each other. The solution that ANT gives to this problem is quite simple and, at least apparently, neat: there is no technology and society as two separate realms that interact with each other: technological artifacts, and also science facts, are actors in the social network, that interact with other actors in a process of constant reshaping and reassembling.
This concept may sound strange at first, but if you look at it in more detail it starts to make, at least, some sense. It is quite obvious that technological artifacts, such as for example the Internet, on one side embody the values, concepts, ideas, cliches.... of the people, groups, and organizations that participate in their design and development (in their construction...); but they also reshape, reorganize, reassemble those other actors, be them humans or not.
ANT has also had its antagonists and it has been, and still is, subjected to very passionate debates (passionate, at least, for academics standards...), such as the Science Wars episode of the early nineties. Hard core positivists freak out whenever the concept of science being socially constructed is introduced. Latour addresses this topic in Reassembling the social with, I think, a good point: saying that science is constructed does not mean that scientific and technological knowledge is not true, but rather that there are lots of resources, interactions and relations between different actors (remember both human and not human) that have to be assembled to construct it.
However, the part I've found most interesting of the book is the section about how to do ANT research, how to write risky accounts in Latour's terms. The author describes an ethnographic approach and a method to capture data about actors and associations, using four notebooks to ensure that both the actors' own perceptions and the effect of the field data on the research and the researcher are logged.
Technorati Tags: actor-network, ANT, society and technology, ethnography, technology
My first experience with ANT was in a doctoral course about Technology, Economy and Society, where different theories about the interaction between technology and society, such as technological determinism or social construction of technology, were briefly described. What I found most interesting about ANT, and differentiating to other theories and frameworks, was the role it gives to non-human actors.
Society and Technology Studies have always struggled to accommodate the mechanisms in which technological artifacts and society interact and shape each other. The solution that ANT gives to this problem is quite simple and, at least apparently, neat: there is no technology and society as two separate realms that interact with each other: technological artifacts, and also science facts, are actors in the social network, that interact with other actors in a process of constant reshaping and reassembling.
This concept may sound strange at first, but if you look at it in more detail it starts to make, at least, some sense. It is quite obvious that technological artifacts, such as for example the Internet, on one side embody the values, concepts, ideas, cliches.... of the people, groups, and organizations that participate in their design and development (in their construction...); but they also reshape, reorganize, reassemble those other actors, be them humans or not.
ANT has also had its antagonists and it has been, and still is, subjected to very passionate debates (passionate, at least, for academics standards...), such as the Science Wars episode of the early nineties. Hard core positivists freak out whenever the concept of science being socially constructed is introduced. Latour addresses this topic in Reassembling the social with, I think, a good point: saying that science is constructed does not mean that scientific and technological knowledge is not true, but rather that there are lots of resources, interactions and relations between different actors (remember both human and not human) that have to be assembled to construct it.
However, the part I've found most interesting of the book is the section about how to do ANT research, how to write risky accounts in Latour's terms. The author describes an ethnographic approach and a method to capture data about actors and associations, using four notebooks to ensure that both the actors' own perceptions and the effect of the field data on the research and the researcher are logged.
Technorati Tags: actor-network, ANT, society and technology, ethnography, technology
3 comments:
Hi Peter,
I ended up on your blog after reading your post about France on Grant McCracken's blog. I am pleased to scan your posts and find that you are interested in ANT, like I am. I come more from a marketing/communication background but I am fascinated by the way technological changes, especially around web2.0 environments will lead us to change the way we think about brands, markets and consumption and so on. I have been working with ANT, but also M. Serres or Boltanski for a few months now and I take Re-assembling the Social as a very enligtening summary of main concepts and methods. Latour appears to me as the Nietzsche of Sociology sometimes.
Good luck with it if you are not done with it yet! Btw, do you by any chance understand French ? If yes, you may be interested in checking out this sociology seminar:
http://semioweb.msh-paris.fr/AAR/343/liste_conf.asp
I have no clue why I wrote Peter, Albert ! No offence and sorry for the nixing up thing :)
Best,
Idnca,
Thanks for the comment!
Web2.0 and ANT, two topics that I have covered in several posts...
I finished reading Reassembling the social a few weeks ago, but I'm still trying to grasp all the ramifications and implications. The seminars that you linked to may be of help, but my French is a little rusty these days and I have to take them with some patience....
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