i don't know what you mean by non-ontological.  the ontology i was
referring to was the philosophic concept dealing with what exists.  As
best as i can can see... everything participates in ontology of some
sort.  There is of course categorical ontology such as that of
librarians and botanists.

The story i like to tell about socialization is... the learning of
athenian laws.   the 'laws' of athens according to aristotle were
carved into the walls around the  agora.  Supposedly when the tribes
children reached a certain age, i think it was 8, they were taken to
the agora to learn to read, and they started with the laws.  That was
the start of their 'ethics' which is the proper study of the operation
of the polis....

I have intuitions about socialization too, but I think the STS
oriented person in me has a slightly different version of
socialization and it is this version that is what helps understanding
of actor network.   STS and actor-network theory relates very strongly
to the idea of controversy analysis, specificly scientific and
technological controversies.  One of the famous examples is that of
the bicycle, and how it became to be the way it tends to be and there
is a story there that people in sts tell, it is a story of the Social
Construction of Technology(scot) in which the technology in question
is related to a field of possible and existent technologies that were
chosen for from social groups who liked one or the other for some
reason or another.  These groups advocate certain technologies until
there is agreement on the eventual form that the technologies take.
In the SCOT, model we see the controversy between the groups... who
are separate, but related to the technologies, they.  The groups
though are treated symmetrically, because in STS we want the story of
the even to unfold in a way that actually explains it without bias.
This is derived from what was called epor, or the empirical programme
of relativism which was related to the strong programme and the
edinburg school.  Now the idea there is that we have to accept the
merit of the histories of all of the possible explanations of
scientific controversies.  That is... we cannot tell the story from
the standpoint of the winners or the losers because either standpoint
will of course not tell us how the scientific fact or the technology
arose, it will only tell us the history of the humans involved.  (this
is a really shortened and likely biased presentation of a very
complicated set of historical relations)   The point being that the
attempt was being made to find ways to explain how technologies come
about, how scientific facts come about.

If we take this standpoint of controversy analysis as a basis, it is
easier to see how one has to turn toward a means of explanation that
does not bias one between the actors/actants in the story.  It also
opens up the question of a different set of ideas of possibilities on
socialization, because socialization becomes the negotiation of
controversies and seeing how these controversies are settled amongst
all parties.  Those of you with at least two children will probably
see how this works, because the resolution of one issue of
socialization with one of your children is usually a different
resolution with the other child... The idea of actor network theory is
not to talk so much about the stabilities of the stories we have told
about controversies, but to explore the way the stories develop and
change over time due to changes in the networks, the relations, and
the actions of the participants.  This is an inherently unstable world
that actor-network posits, and it says that we deal with it by not
looking at the stabilities, but at the changes, and how those changes
in relations affect the system which produces the current state, which
of course will be different in a few hours, days, months, etc., and
could tend toward stability or perhaps doesn't tend toward stability.
That is part of the agnosticism necessary to actor-network i think,
beyond principle of relativity, principle of symmetry, relational
epistemology/ontology, there is a skepticism and agnosticism about...
how the system got to this state, what accounts for it, and how the
system may be in a very different state in the future.  We can only
really see the changes in the relations that recruited things to the
current state and belief about the state, and describe that story
without biasing toward one set of objects/subjects, etc. or another.
So it is the idea of controversy, that feeds this descriptive
framework and methodological position.

I'm not saying that socialization changes in light of ignoring
traditional categories of analysis, but i will say that understandings
of socialization vary immensely, and the account of socialization that
you would get from someone in SCOT in relation to technologies will be
very different than one given from someone in ANT, and that is because
the epistemological and ontological standpoints are very different,
but historically related.

at least that's the story i'm telling today... maybe after i read
another book it will be different and i'll have been recruited to a
different perspective ;)




On Apr 23, 2009, at 2:17 PM, Victor Margolin wrote:

> I will take Jeremy's point about the distinction between relational
> and ontological epistemology and also the use of the term
> properties. Relational ontology is certainly useful in understanding
> networks of action and raises the question of what happens to the
> socialization process when we reduce the number of ontological
> relations in favor of relational ones. I have been thinking about
> this for quite a few years. To go farther requires a greater
> knowledge of psychology than I have but the thought I would like to
> put forward is the connection between our relations to humans and
> our relations to artifacts. I have an intuitive belief that there is
> much that we learn about socialization by relating to people in
> terms of expected responses, constraints on our own behavior,
> potential for enhancement of our life, danger to our well being etc.
> The question is what happens when we begin to relate more to non-
> ontological entities as do many folks who do much more on line than
> folks in my generation. Does this change the socialization process
> and if so how? This is a good question for those in the design field
> to be thinking about as a consequence of technological change.
> Victor
> --
> Victor Margolin
> Professor Emeritus of Design History
> Department of Art History
> University of Illinois at Chicago
> 935 W. Harrison St.
> Chicago, IL 60607-7039
> Tel. 1-312-583-0608
> Fax 1-312-413-2460
> website: www.uic.edu/~victor