good point,
cameron.
i would not have any objection to taking seriously the anthromorphisms that
ordinary users of technology use to handle and explain their use of
artifacts. the cognitive models that people employ provide important
explanatory clues to how they act. but actor-network theory goes further.
it reifies popular anthropomorphisms, which does not go towards
understanding language. i for myself have been more interested in
stakeholder networks that advance artifacts and bring them to fruition.
designers are participants in those networks
klaus
-----Original Message-----
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related
research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Cameron
Tonkinwise
Sent: Wednesday, July 25, 2007 9:37 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Being in Athropomorphic Service
There has been some discussion on this list in the past about the value of
anthropomorphizing technology, or the value of using anthropormorphism as
way of understanding either how designers design or how designs design
(use-worlds and users for example). Those interested could look through the
archives, but I am still wondering why
Klaus Krippendorff wrote:
[when] actor-network theory ... anthropomorphizes technology[,] it does a
disservice to design ?
By the way, whilst Latour is his own worst enemy
- inasmuch as he never resists the temptation to let his argument run to
amusing or ridiculous (depending on your mood when
reading) consequences; and his fellow ANTers in the nineties relished the
reflexive playfulness that his writings licensed [see in particular the
discussion the myth of Moses' bus-preventing bridges on the roads to New
York beaches by Woolgar and Cooper*] - Latour is insistent that, as an
[enthnographic, or more precisely, an ethnomethodological] sociologist
(actor-network-theory being neither a method nor a theory but merely an
imperative to 'follow the actants'), he is only concerned about
a) the way in which users of technologies, but moreso, developers of
technologies, do talk about technologies in anthropomorphic ways whilst
using or developing technologies
b) the ways in which users and developers of technologies act in relation to
technologies that indicate that the anthropomorphism they profess, even if
in merely metaphoric ways, does appear to be warranting their actions - ie
it is their theory-in-use and not just a poetic shorthand espoused theory
In other words, Latour (as opposed to some lesser quality
exegetes) is not arguing that technologies are moral agents, but that to
understand comprehensively how technologies get developed, and how they
become useful in the everyday life of our societies, to the point of being
taken-for-granted (ie become second nature or our artificial ecosystem), one
must acknowledge that developers and users take seriously, ie act on the
basis of, anthropomorphic propositions. Anthropomorphism is more
(effectual) than an 'as if' even if it is less than an ontological truth
(from the modern perspective).
By the way, a link between this discussion about anthropomorphism and the
parallel thread about ethnography, can be found in Latour's reseponse to
Ulrich Beck's work on cosmopolitanism. There Latour insists that otherness
must be granted not only to people to things; in other words, an authentic
ethnographer (or cosmpolitician in Stengers
sense) does not bring assumptions about what does and does not have agency
to encounters with artefacts as well as people. See his "Whose Cosmos, Which
Cosmopolitics? Comments on the Peace Terms of Ulrich Beck" _Common
Knowledge_ Vol.10 No.3 (2004)
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/common_knowledge/v010/10.3latour.html
Cameron
*"Do Artefacts Have Ambivalence? Moses' Bridges, Winner's Bridges and other
Urban Legends in S&TS"
Steve Woolgar and Geoff Cooper
Social Studies of Science Vol.29 No.3 (June 1999)
http://www.jstor.org/view/03063127/ap010095/01a00050/0
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