ARTS2090 Week 4

ARTS2090 Week 4 -Assemblages and Actor-Networked Theory.

         This week's topic gave me a headache...In my personal opinion, "theory" is a scientific term that includes a thesis of "if"... "then". If a theory is proven, then it becomes a law, which is agreed upon universally, like the law of universal gravitation, objects accelerates at 9.81 m/s².Basically a theory has two functions, one is to assume or address the matter, then prove something that is true, and the other function is for people to know these things exist. Today we are learning ANT, namely Actor-Networked Theory, which combines technological determinism and social determinism together. For a long period of time people have been arguing whether technology drove the society or vice versa. These three men Michel Callon, Bruno Latour, and John Law came up with the idea of combining human and non-human actants that acted as an assemblage. The theory seems very complicated at first, but after looking at some examples, I grasped some ideas. The example Wikipedia gave were cars and a black box. People do not necessarily know how a car functions, but they still drove them. Until some vital parts of the car are broken, people started to realize without some parts they cannot drove. Which leads back the things that collaborated the whole car as a system, without any small parts, they cannot function. Actor-Networked Theory simply put, is a cause-and-effect theory. It does not explain why and how it functions, but it states because of this, and this happens. The theory somehow reminded of an ecosystem in terms of the environmental science. An ecosystem is a community that functions as a food chain, for example sun provides energy for sea weeds, and sea weeds provide essential nutrition for microorganisms, and shrimps feeds on microorganisms, then fish feeds on shrimps and so on. Without any of these, the ecosystem will collapse. The same goes to Actor-Networked Theory. It helped people to draw out the relationship between each components and how it affected each other.