So, Actor-Network Theory. I thought it’d be something like a map to celebrities’ homes, but instead it is this confusing concept that just… doesn’t really make sense. The reading we were presented with this week aimed not to explain what it is, but rather to dispel our misconceptions about what it isn’t.
It’s not a ‘network’ in the structural sense. We can’t look at it two-dimensionally, or even three-dimensionally. Every connection to every node is a new dimension, or something. Somehow. I’m choosing to disregard this, because I think if people ask me to look at things in the infinite-dimension my brain will die. Instead, I’m just gonna look at it three-dimensionally. Well, two-dimensionally, but all colour-graded and fancy-like so that if I look at it through those old-fashioned 3D glasses it looks like that third-dimension is lurking around somewhere.
Actor-networks lack the qualities of a technical network, as in order, strategy and, well, sense. That doesn’t tell me what they actually contain, other than disorder and randomness. They could contain copious amounts of squirrels and ebola-infected mud bricks. Common sense would suggest otherwise, but if Networked Media’s taught me anything it’s that common sense is useless, always.
One thing that is clear between these networks and normal social theory is the importance of non-human ‘actors’. Concepts can act as nodes or even hubs, and the theoretical and untraceable connections that bind them can link an infinite number of these non-descript entities. That just makes it more confusing: this isn’t social theory, I’m told, but it totally is. Just… like, it’s society. That’s what society is, connections, between things that are human and sentient as well with things that aren’t.
What. Is. This. Shit.
It’s a story about connections. It’s about the actors that maintain the connections. It’s about the network that comes from the actors and the connections that they maintain. It’s about the concepts that navigate the network that comes from the actors and the connections that they maintain.
Goddammit.