ANT has been developped by students of science and technology and their claim is that it is utterly impossible to understand what holds the society together without reinjecting in its fabric the facts manufactured by natural and social sciences and the artefacts designed by engineers. As a second approximation, ANT is thus the claim that the only way to achieve this reinjection of the things into our understanding of the social fabrics is through a network-like ontology and social theory.
Actor-network theory has been mentioned a few times in class, generally with the association that it was a complex oncoming topic that would be difficult to understand, but one which would usefully be related to the topics which we have already covered.
The definition above, from the reading, was the best that i could grasp but the concept is still one that I’m having trouble understanding.
I do agree with certain aspects of ANT according to the reading.
I agree that objects and theories should be included in networks.
I do believe there should be nothing in the connections but the connections themselves.
I do not see how understanding these networks helps to understand the world better or to make life easier at all.
Yes it eliminates the concept of distance as connections cannot be measured by length, but what does this accomplish?
And as for eliminating scale, I disagree. All networks seem to me to be bigger or smaller depending on the amount of nodes in the network. How do networks in ANT differ?
These are things which I will have to explore in the workshop tomorrow morning.