1. Ketrina Yim CS260—Human Centered Computing 4/1/2009
Actor Network Theory
Ketrina Yim
CS260—Human Centered Computing
4/1/2009

2. The Sociology of Organizations
Where does a leader’s power come from?
How do people in positions of power stay there?
What protects organizations from forces that might collapse them?
The creation of hierarchies and the power that it grants to its constituents is a major point of discourse in sociology. There are several key questions that sociologists seek answers to in exploring organizations.

3. What is Actor Network Theory?
An approach to social theory originating from science studies
A material-semiotic method
Explores how relations between objects, people, and concepts are formed, rather than why they are formed
Actor Network Theory is one of the approaches to considering how organizations form and stay in place.
ANT originated from science studies, which seeks to place scientific knowledge in a social, historical, and philosophical context.
It is known as a material-semiotic method, meaning that it considers the relations involving both tangible objects and concepts.
Actor-network theorists think about how the relations between objects, people, and concepts are created, maintained, or destroyed, instead of why.

4. The Three Components of ANT
Heterogeneous Networks
Network Consolidation
Network Ordering
According to John Law, there are three main ideas behind Actor Network Theory.

5. Heterogeneous Networks
“Knowledge” emerges from networks of heterogeneous materials
“Knowledge” takes on many forms
“Knowledge” is a social product, instead of the result of privileged scientific methods
Heterogeneous networks are composed of multiple types of materials: people, devices, artifacts, texts, and institutions are just some of the things that can be a part of an actor-network. Interactions and processes between these materials generates “knowledge”. Law places knowledge in double quotes because it can take on a variety of forms, both abstract and tangible. Papers, presentations, data tables, patents, and developed skills are just some of the “knowledge” that can emerge.
For example, the fact that DNA is a double helix is common knowledge, published in biology books and taught in science classes. This knowledge emerged from the race to discover DNA’s structure between Linus Pauling and a pair of researchers named Watson and Crick, who in turn were influenced by X-ray diffraction images created by Rosalind Franklin. And of course, none of this would have been possible without the discovery of DNA’s existence, the foundations of biochemistry, and even the DNA itself.
3) The involvement of so many different materials suggests that knowledge is a social product, rather than something generated by scientific methods.

6. Heterogeneous Engineering
In actor-network theory, this is essentially what defines science
Science takes parts of the social, technical, conceptual, and textual and transforms them into heterogeneous scientific products
Applies to other institutions as well
The process of knowledge generation can be referred to as heterogeneous engineering. To an actor-network theorist, this is what science essentially is.
The notion of heterogeneous engineering can apply to other institutions. Indeed, any aspect of social life—family, technology, the economy—can be viewed as processes of heterogeneous engineering.

7. Interactions and Artifacts
Social networks are more than just the people
Material objects mediate interpersonal interactions
Define relationships and context
Affect individual behaviors and actions
Preferences in interaction create patterning, which in turn creates order
1) The implication here is that the social is composed of patterned heterogeneous networks and greater than just the people involved.
2) The rationale behind the notion is that interactions between people are almost always mediated—by language, by devices, by objects. They define the relationships and the context for activities by participating in social relations. As a result, objects can determine how people behave and the actions they perform. In fact, right now, the presentation being shown on this laptop and projected by this projector are determining our actions. I stand here speaking, while you listen, perhaps taking notes in the meantime. I could easily sit back down, or you could take over my presentation, but we don’t do either of these things because the slides and projector, for the moment, establish a speaker/audience relationship between me and you.
3) Additionally, every person and object has preferences in how interaction occurs. These preferences create patterns in the networks the objects and people are involved in, which as a result create orderings.

8. ANT and Ethics
Are the people no different from the objects in an actor network?
ANT can be used to inform ethical questions of the human effect’s special character
Actors are heterogeneous networks, too, hence actor-networks
At this point, actor network theory seems to suggest that people are no different from objects in an actor-network.
From an analytical standpoint, that’s true, but not from an ethical one. By no means does it allow us to deny people we interact with the rights and responsibilities normally attributed to humans.
Such as those involving individuals kept alive by intensive care technologies.
The point to be made here is that actors are patterned networks of heterogeneous relations, or effects of such networks. Human attributes (thinking, writing, acting, loving) are generated by networks existing both within and without a body. Our ideas are produced by outside influences; we express thoughts on paper, in blogs, and in movement; we develop love by interacting with other people.

9. Network Consolidation
Some networks aren’t noticeable, until they break down
Networks can be immensely complex, so being completely aware of all the networks around us is infeasible
Humans consolidate networks to simplify the world around them
But how come we often don’t notice the networks around us? We treat many things as single objects, without considering the networks that they embody. For example, cars are a network of various electronic and mechanical components, as well as the human interactions that created them. Operating systems seem to work as a whole, but are actually a network of applications, processes, the interventions of the programmers and designers involved in its development, and the interventions of the corporation (or open source community) that claims ownership. We don’t usually pay attention to all these components until the car breaks down or the computer crashes.
The answer is simple. Complexity often slows things down, so people hide it through abstraction. If a network appears to operate as a whole, we treat it as a single entity.

10. Punctualization Often occurs in widely-performed network patterns
Punctualized networks become resources in heterogeneous engineering
Hides the network’s complexity
The network may fail if resistance is encountered
This process of abstraction is also called punctualization.
It often occurs in widely-performed network patterns, such as routines. Everything is a network, but people don’t need to be constantly aware of this fact. Thus, punctualization takes place.
Resources can be anything: agents, texts, machines, protocols, organizational relations. And people can quickly draw from resources without dealing with the underlying complexities. However, punctualization is considered precarious. Resources can’t be guaranteed to work as predicted (machines break down, programs crash, people forget or disobey instructions). Networks can degenerate as a result of resources failing or resisting.

11. Social Order Punctualization is an endless process
Social structure is a verb
The structure is constantly changing
Ordering creates power, but can be contested
Individual preferences can cause resistance
Order can also create devices, agents, and institutions
It is never achieved once and for all. Structures are sites of constant recursive generation and reproduction. No network (agent, organization, or order) is complete, autonomous, or final.
Dictators and some sociologists insist that there is one social order, one center for this order, and one set of stable relations. Actor Network Theory says social order is not singular, never truly complete, and always subject to resistances.

12. Network Ordering
Effects of order, power, and organization often come from punctualized actors
In actors and organizations, ANT considers:
How components are mobilized and managed
How resistance is handled
How punctualization and translation occur unnoticed
1) Or rather, it comes from the borrowing, bending, distorting, misinterpreting, reshaping, and appropriation of the work created by the networks they embody.

13. Translation and Power
Translation is a contingent, local, and variable process
Implies transformation, equivalence, and symbolic representation
Translation generates order by generating agents, devices, and organizations
A process where a network of actors decide that a network is worth constructing and protecting. Translation occurs based on conditions and its results can’t always be predicted.
Translation suggests that things can be changed, can be equivalent to other things, and that one thing can stand for something else.
Actor Network Theory reveals four findings in exploring translation and how networks overcome resistance.

14. Durability
We the people…
Less Durable More Durable
Some materials are more durable than others, and thus maintain more long-lived relational patterns
Using durable materials to embody relations ensures good ordering
A material’s effects can depend on the network that it occupies
Materials can be viewed as occupying a durability continuum. For example, thoughts and speech don’t last very long, but books and recordings can exist for decades or centuries.
However, there are a couple things to be aware of. The first is that the durability of a material may depend on the relations it’s involved in. A rather simplistic example is that a magazine in a waiting room probably won’t be as durable as one that’s archived in a library.
The second is that the network affects the effect a material produces. A computer in a designer’s office serves a different purpose and can create different things from a computer in an accounting firm.
The result is that durability creates a temporal ordering.

15. Mobility Creates a spatial ordering
Surveillance and control create centers and peripheries
ANT explores communication materials and processes in particular, and how translation can transmit “immutable mobiles”
May still be subject to relations and networks
Mobility creates ordering through space, by acting from a distance.
The ability to act from a distance produces the effects of surveillance and control. Examples include security cameras, laws, radio waves, and referees.
Immutable mobiles are materials with high mobility and durability. These attributes make immutable mobiles particularly suited for communications. They are easily transported between people, such as newspapers, maps, letters, and military orders.
As with durability, mobility is also dependent on the material’s relations and the network it is involved in.

16. Calculability
Anticipating the responses of materials to be translated is key to effective translation
Calculation is a method of anticipation, and the result of certain innovations
Calculation is a set of social methods and relations, and works only on material representations
Such as literacy, bureaucracy, print, bookkeeping, and electronic data entry. It’s not exactly the Holy Grail of translation, though.
And since representations can be fallible as a result of misinterpretations or errors, calculation is only as accurate as the representation it is operating on.

17. Scoping The scope in which ordering takes place must be considered
Generally local, though there may be translation strategies applying to a wider range of networks and locations
Centers of translation required for explicit calculation
These farther-reaching strategies, if they exist, are most likely implicit calculation.
There may be multiple strategies coexisting and interacting with each other, considering no order is ever truly complete. Some include administration, enterprise, vocation, and vision, which work together to produce multi-strategic agents, organizations, and transactions between organizations. Some might call organizations themselves a set of strategies to generate durability, mobility, and calculability, all with the intention of generating hierarchies and configurations of center and periphery.

18. Applicability in Computing
Ubiquitous computing and wireless devices
Actor Network Theory is applicable to several areas in the world of computers. The first is in ubiquitous computing (or ubicomp), where small, inexpensive information processors occupy a multitude of objects people often interact with. Mobile phones, global positioning systems, music players, and “intelligent” clothing are among the devices many consider to be a part of ubiquitous computing. In the heterogeneous network of ubicomp, people interact with devices, or perhaps interfaces on the devices. At the same time, the devices may interact with each other, and consequently other people, through wireless networks. Consideration of Actor Network Theory could bring about more natural approaches to human-machine interaction (those not requiring a text interface or GUI) and make computing even more pervasive.

19. Applicability in Computing
The Internet
Actor Network Theory is also very relevant to the Internet. It is arguably the one of the most complex heterogeneous networks, composed of the interactions among users, applications, computers, web pages, information, and history. Most people punctualize it into a single entity, because for each person it appears to work as a whole. The Internet is a very durable and, with the arrival of wireless, highly mobile material—making it ideal for communication and, for some, surveillance. Also, its decentralized and constantly shifting nature make it very resistant to attempts at censorship, subjugation, and regulation, creating tensions between it and a number of institutions, such as governments. An actor-network theorist could probably spend a lifetime studying the Internet, or even just one of the processes acting within it.

20. Applicability in Computing
Computer games (especially MMOs)
A third entity that is quite easily described as actor-networks is the computer game. The actor-network is especially noticeable in massively multiplayer online games, where individuals not only interact with their interfaces and player characters, but also the player characters of other individuals and the world of objects that they all occupy.
This is not to say that single-player games can’t be described as actor-networks. A player interacts with the computer to control the character, while the character interacts with the game world’s characters and objects, whose responses affect the player’s actions. The game may even attempt to convey some sort of message to the player to influence his or her thoughts and beliefs. And with both types of gaming, further complexity of the actor network is revealed when players update their game software with patches, install expansion packs, fix driver issues, or consult strategy guides.
Armed with knowledge of actor-network theory, one could explore how gaming communities emerge and endure or determine ways of strengthening games as persuasive technology.

21. Conclusion
Actor Network Theory studies society in terms of the relationships between people and objects, all of which are networks of relations in themselves
Networks produce patterns, generating and reproducing hierarchies, organizations, agents, and order
It is a sociology demanding consideration of machines and architecture as well as the humans that create and use them

22. Discussion
Think about some actor-networks that you might be a part of. What are these networks composed of? What do they generate? What resistances do they face, and how do they protect themselves from it?
Can a person’s identity be defined without the objects he or she regularly interacts with?