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Actor Network Theory (ANT) - Latoru - Actor-Network

4 important questions on Actor Network Theory (ANT) - Latoru - Actor-Network

Why would it maybe not make sense to worry about technology?

- Means worrying about everything in existence as everything is intertangled.

- Problems and threats exist within the consolation of networks. Not with one element in the network per se. this means that talking about technological effects and being and worrying about technological implications is missing the bigger picture.

- You cannot just identify one element in the network because it is not doing anything.

For what was the ANT never meant for?

to explain anything. They didn’t want it to be a scientific framework.
it was just intended as a way for researchers to study and describe what actors do and why without having to explain this behavior by all kinds of exterior forces.

What does the ANT just sights?

it just sights that the typical scientific argument took more a top down perspective of what’s actually happening here.

- What is the network, what does it look like?

- It has clear flaws and doesn’t explain anything. It is nice to think about it (philosophically) but it is not useful on an explanatory level.

If we want to explain something, on an explanatory level, we need to zoom in and out and decide which parts we are using in our explanation. What does Latour call this process?

Latour calls this process blackboxing.

Example: Effect of videogames on children's behavior. Take videogames out of the network and take children out of the netowork. Then look for cause and effect. However, this isn't describing reality because reality is an actor network. We can only do that if:
- we just acknowledged that we just boxed the element: so blakcboxing.
- it is useful for scientists, we always do this when looking for explanations