Everyday Technologies
Actor-network theory (ANT) is a methodology developed in the 1980s by scholars working primarily in the sociology of science and technology. Mostly Bruno Latour
It attempts to redefine actors not so much as willful or intentional agents but instead as any entity—human or nonhuman—that in some way influences or perturbs the activity of a techno-social system
ANT resists large generalizations and categories, including the very notion of the "social" which, according to actor-network theorists, is never an explanation but instead is that which must be explained.
ANT formulated originally to rethink traditional categories of sociology (e.g. class, gender, race, etc)
Early ANT is exemplified by the work of John Law, Michel Callon, and Bruno Latour
Initially they were concerned with the too-rapid sorting of objects of study into rigidly distinct categories: the social and the natural
They wanted to understand how humans and nonhumans (including tools, technologies, texts, and the material world) come together, to use Latour's terminology, how they form alliances or associations in order to produce and stabilize a particular state of affairs.
Early ANT scholars such as Law, Callon, and Latour were strongly influenced by the Edinburgh School's "strong program."
Specifically by the “principle of symmetry” - “The strong program "would be symmetrical in its style of explanation. The same types of cause would explain, say, true and false beliefs.” (Bloor 1976)
Explanation: in traditional sociology of science, the social was often used to explain scientific failure while nature was called to explain success
Both the Edinburgh School and ANT scholars saw society not as an explanation of a particular state of affairs (e.g., phrenology), but what needed to be explained.
Rather than using society to explain false beliefs—to demonstrate how members of a particular group were deluded by belief, superstition, or prejudice—Bloor is asking that success, scientific truth, also be explained by the same categories.
ANT extended that principle to nature itself.
I think now the only way to achieve Bloor's goal is through what Michel Callon calls the generalized principle of symmetry. It goes like this: let's treat society and nature symmetrically. This new symmetry principle is much different from Bloor because Bloor is a radical Durkheimian thinker, which is to say that society "up there" should be able to explain true and false belief in the same terms—the inputs of nature being necessary to anchor our beliefs, but not to shape them (Latour 2012, 256)
The work of Callon, Law, and Latour grew out of specific STS case studies, where they needed to account for a variety of human and nonhuman actors while at the same time remaining limited by the boundaries of the empirical questions being addressed
In 1986, Law first published "On Long-Distance Navigation," a case study of the Portuguese carracks and their role in global trade.
Law doesn't assume a Portuguese society imbued with a need for global economic domination or the technical apparatus of the ships as merely mechanical.
Instead, he follows the network that forms a complex assemblage including objects, captains, kings, texts, and a range of disciplined human and nonhuman actors.
The second purpose of this paper is thus to argue that though artefacts form an important part of systems of long-distance control they do not, so to speak, stand apart as means or tools to be directed by social interests. Rather they should be seen as forming an integral part of such systems, interwoven with the social, the economic and the rest, and their form is thus a function of the way in which they absorb within themselves aspects of their seemingly non-technological environments. (Law 1996, 234)
Michel Callon and his "Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of Saint Brieuc Bay"
"Instead of imposing a pre-established grid of analysis upon these, the observer follows the actors in order to identify the manner in which these define and associate the different elements by which they build and explain their world, whether it be social or natural." (Callon 1996, 201)
"These moments constitute the different phases of a general process called translation, during which the identity of actors, the possibility of interaction and the margins of manoeuvre are negotiated and delimited." (Ibid)