Actor-Network Theory in the Blogosphere

By | July 21, 2008
6 Comments

Today I decided to use google’s blogsearch tool to look for blogs that have entries on actor-network theory. I got this returned. I was kinda surprised that most of the blogs that have entries on ANT are written by graduate students (this, this and this are examples). Is there going to be a boom in its application in the near future? What is the main attraction?

6 thoughts on “Actor-Network Theory in the Blogosphere”

  1. julian

    Miller & Slater used it in their classic “The Internet – An Ethnographic Approach”, though not to a great extent.
    I’d say the main attraction is that it’s quite applicable to technology studies (it allows agency for non-human actants), and that, superficially, the ‘network’ part of the name seems to make it a perfect fit for studies of the internet. However, Latour explicitly disusses this and says he came up with the name before the internet, and wonders whether another name (eg ‘worknet’) would be more useful in order to avoid the confusion (pp129-133, “. Reassembling the Social…”).
    Here are a couple of small contributions from me – another graduate student 🙂
    http://www.julianhopkins.net/archives/65-Internet-as-actant.html
    http://www.julianhopkins.net/archives/53-Reflexivity.htm

  2. julian

    Miller & Slater used it in their classic “The Internet – An Ethnographic Approach”, though not to a great extent.
    I’d say the main attraction is that it’s quite applicable to technology studies (it allows agency for non-human actants), and that, superficially, the ‘network’ part of the name seems to make it a perfect fit for studies of the internet. However, Latour explicitly disusses this and says he came up with the name before the internet, and wonders whether another name (eg ‘worknet’) would be more useful in order to avoid the confusion (pp129-133, “. Reassembling the Social…”).
    Here are a couple of small contributions from me – another graduate student 🙂
    http://www.julianhopkins.net/archives/65-Internet-as-actant.html
    http://www.julianhopkins.net/archives/53-Reflexivity.htm

  3. ailsa

    Thanks for linking me in 🙂
    I chose the approach
    1. for studying change, and its non-linear effects
    2. because it acknowledges non human actors as having influence
    ailsa

  4. ailsa

    Thanks for linking me in 🙂
    I chose the approach
    1. for studying change, and its non-linear effects
    2. because it acknowledges non human actors as having influence
    ailsa

  5. Olga

    Hi,
    this is sort of a late comment, i have found this post searching “blogosphere” and “actro-network theory” in google. Do you by chanse have any idea if wnyone has ever appliyed this theory researching development blogosphere on a certain society?
    Graduate student also, btw (:

  6. Olga

    Hi,
    this is sort of a late comment, i have found this post searching “blogosphere” and “actro-network theory” in google. Do you by chanse have any idea if wnyone has ever appliyed this theory researching development blogosphere on a certain society?
    Graduate student also, btw (:

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