11.5

this week’s reading was on actor-network theory… this reading was insanely dense and other than the two following points (below) I could pull out – and probably only because they were listed “firstly” and “secondly” which made it easy to gravitate towards them like the simple-minded human I am – none of it really got through to my brain… maybe from too much coffee/not enough sleep, maybe not enough coffee/too much sleep…maybe because it’s the end of week 11, a thursday afternoon still painfully slogging through the excessive brain damage (then again, a smart person told me once that you can’t kill braincells if you don’t have a brain) I caused myself last weekend and in all honestly I’d actually rather stick thumtacks in my eyelids than sit down and do uni work right now…  but, hey, this has nothing to do with the reading, or networked media, other than of-course to point out how much of a massive failure I am at this subject right now and really I am just rambling on in an attempt to make you feel sorry for me so you ignore the fact that I’ve really gotten nothing from this reading and this post is really barely about the reading at all…the point being, I tried. I really did….so yeah…

misunderstandings generally made about ‘actor theory’ –
1. giving it a common “technical” meaning because it can function in many ways that can’t be classified under one umbrella description
2. actor-network theory has little to do with social networks

this video has a nice modern young woman summing up actor-network theory pretty basically in language that I can understand and I couldn’t even concentrate on what she’s saying, so go figure-

in fact, here’s a youtube search I did which has heaps of links to bruno latour talking about super interesting things (you’re welcome), and then there’s this video somewhere down the list which I sat and watched for about 33 seconds before being like wtf am I doing with my life I am going to go for a nap…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i25aGGrTJK8