Sunday, April 1, 2007

"Welcome to the (In)Human Network"

How's that for using parentheses? I'm playing off the ad campaign by Cisco Systems... their slogan seems to take ANT and invert it, adding humans to what's understood as a network of non-human actants. This is just one digression that's emerged for me in the past few weeks while thinking about Latour. I'm interested in hearing what others might think about another of these digressions:

In the sociolinguistics course I'm in, we've been talking about concepts borrowed from sociology to explain how social networks influence linguistic usage--in any network, there's a relative degree of density and of muliplexity. Density refers to the extent to which members of a social network (actants) all interact with one another; if everybody knows in a network knows everyone else, then the network has a relatively high density. Multiplexity refers to the extent to which actants interact with each other in different social spheres: if the actants in a network work at the same place, live in the same neighborhood, attend the same church, spend free time with each other, etc., then the network is said to be multiplex; whereas a uniplex network consists of actors that interact with different people depending on the social sphere--their neighbors are not their co-workers, etc. This model has interesting implications in terms of class: lower class networks tend to be highly dense and multiplex, whereas middle class networks tend to exhibit relatively low density and are more uniplex. It seems to me that one can extrapolate how bringing the respective non-human actants that each class would typically interact with (factory machines--or now data entry technology--vs. other technologies, respective leisure activities, domestic sites, etc.) into the network would further illuminate these networks.

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