Actor Network Theory

– Recent technologies have often the character of a network, that is, of exclusively related yet very distant element with the circulation between nodes being made compulsory through a set of rigorous paths giving to a few nodes a strategic character.
– Nothing is more intensely connected, more distant, more compulsory and more strategically organized than a computer network.
– The basic metaphor of an actor-network. A technical network in the engineer’s sense is only one of the possible final and stabilized state of an actor network.
– Social network adds information on the relations of humans in a social and natural world which is left untouched by the analysis, ANT aims at accounting for the very essence of societies and natures. It does not wish to add social networks to social theory but to rebuild social theory out of networks.
– An advantage of thinking in terms of networks is that we get rid of ‘the tyranny of distance’ or proximity; elements which are close when disconnected may be infinitely remote if their connections are analysed; conversely, elements which would appear as infinitely distant may be close when their connections are brought back into the picture.
– The notion of network allows us to dissolve the micro- macro- distinction that has plagued social theory from its inception.
– The notion of network, in its barest topological outline, allows us already to reshuffle spatial metaphors that have rendered the study of society-nature so difficult. They are replaced by associations and connections which ANT does not have to qualify as being either social or natural or technical.