copys

This weeks reading completely baffled me…Elliot explained and will add to it. This is what I need explaining!

I will not concern myself here with the quantitative studies especially the so called ‘co-word analysis’ since they are themselves misunderstood because of the difficulty of exactly grasping the social theory and quaint ontology entailed by actor-network

Three misunderstandings are due to common usages of the word network itself

and the connotations they imply.

The first mistake would be to give it a common technical meaning in the

sense of a sewage, or train, or subway, or telephone ‘network’.

The second misunderstanding is easy to lift: the actor-network theory (hence

ANT) has very little to do with the study of social networks. These studies,no matter how interesting, concerns themselves with the social relations ofindividual human actors -their frequency, distribution, homogeneity, proximity. hy then use the word network since it is opened to such misunderstandings?

The use of the word comes from Diderot. The word ‘réseau’ was used from the beginning by Diderot to describe matter and bodies in order to avoid the Cartesian divide between matter and spirit. Thus, the origin of the word (‘réseau’ in French) that comes from Diderot’s work has from the beginning a strong ontological component (Anderson, 1990). Put too simply ANT is achange of methaphors to describe essences: instead of surfaces one getsfilaments (or rhyzomes in Deleuze’s parlance (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980).

More precisely it is a change of topology. Instead of thinking in terms of surfaces -two dimension- or spheres -three dimension- one is asked to think in terms of nodes that have as many dimensions as they have connections.