Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) is a model for research on sociology of technology. ANT principles could be surprising to humanities teachers, but they are a natural fit, perhaps even orthodox, for software engineers and high-school ICT teachers.
How ANT fits with ICT
The ANT posits that knowledge (including created objects and systems) is a social product. (Law 1992) ICT Students experience this as they work in teams to investigate an existing information system or organisation. Students discover that the presumed Purpose of the system is contentious, and students seek to identify stakeholders beyond the nominal ‘client’, and understand their experience.
Students discover that the knowledge is formed through interaction of people and technology in a heterogenous network. The concept of network effects is heavily used in senior high school ICT courses. ANT applies this concept to social relations.
ANT uses the term Generalised Symmetry for the assumption that, in order to expose assumptions about the mechanics of power, all Actants (both human and artifact) should be described in identical terms. We already teach a system analysis approach that starts with this assumption.
Level 1 Data Flow Diagram
Just as ICT students do when drawing a data-flow diagram, ANT focuses on the mediators (all actants who make a difference to the information process) and sets aside the intermediaries (who make no difference). ICT students consider substitutes, both human and technological, for each part of the system, and evaluate the potential for replacement of whole systems.
We often casually treat whole systems (e.g. the PC, the Internet, the United Nations) as single entities, at least when they are widely used without trouble, in order to free up attention for other details. ICT students should recognise this benefit as the rationale of top-down-design and modular programming. This is the Punctualization of widely used (social) network patterns, an ongoing process that is precarious and readily reversed.
Power is achieved by translation, the ordering of a social network by creation or substitution of interactions, actants or whole sections of network, to punctualize contested processes. ANT posits that power is not the cause but an effect of the social network. This could be illustrated by a sysadmin’s task of securing computer networks through the manipulation of intersecting routing rules, group memberships, object permissions and proxies.
ANT leads to the idea that durability of an institution is an effect of the relations around it. Similarly, ICT classes talk about product lifecycle and the superseding of still-operational products, as social effects.
Durability of some part of a system is a consequence of actants performing the relations that surround it, embodying them by setting up tools that enable those transactions. For example, peer-communication between students becomes more entrenched when Web 2.0 access is provided.
Objections
Warren (2003) describes the strangeness of “giving voice to inanimate objects such as computers”, but the narratives of machines are not foreign to the classroom. ICT teachers often hear “My Mac is not happy: every time I tell it to print it sits and sulks.” or “You say you never go on Facebook but the logs tell a different story.” I don’t disparage anthropomorphisation and I don’t assume it is ‘just’ a figure of speech, for three reasons. Firstly, I respect the validity of subjective experience of the speaker. Secondly, I have come to suspect that projection actually facilitates learning about the experience. In addition, emotional engagement is an effective adaptation to modern products designed to evoke and utilise that reaction.
Some may object to implications of intentionality in machines. It doesn’t matter. We bought the machine because we expected it to fulfil a specific purpose: we expect it to behave accordingly. We don’t really understand how complex machines work, and we are likely to see ’emergent behaviour’ as if they had undisclosed intentions.
References
- Law, J., 1992. Notes on the theory of the actor-network: Ordering, strategy, and heterogeneity. Systemic Practice and Action Research, 5(4), 379-393
- Warren, W. 2003. Actor-Network Theory goes to School, Deakin University