Relative Time and Space

According to Bingham, actor-network theory is "concerned with how all sorts of bits and pieces; bodies, machines, and buildings, as well as texts, are associated together in attempts to build order" (1996). Therefore, agency is purely relational and absolute time and space are irrelevant (Graham; 1998).

Several scientists have similar views of time and space in the social construction of technology. Harraway talked of the coming of cyborgs - an increased blending of humans with the technological (1991). Pile and Thrift said, a "vivid, moving, contingent and open-ended cosmology" is emerging (1996: 37). These scientists draw from Bruno Latour's actor-network theory (ANT) (1993); they hold rather relational views of the social construction of   technology. 

Whiggishness, taking its name from the British Whigs, is a historiography that believes in an endless progression of social democracies toward greater enlightenment, mainly through the effect of scientific progress. Actor-network theory does not concern itself with a priori structures, such as a power, but neither does Whig history. Are Harraway, Pile, and Thrift trying to re-introduce Whig history into information sciences and technology studies? 

Driven by actor-network theory, Nigel Thrift said,

"No technology is ever found working in splendid isolation as though it is the central node in the social universe.  It is linked - by social purposes to which it is put - to humans and other technologies of different kinds. It is linked to a chain of different activities involving other technologies. And it is heavily contextualized. Thus the telephone, say, at someone's place of work had (and has) a different meaning from the telephone in, say, their bedroom, and is often used in quite different ways" (Thrift, 1996).

However, Latour makes little distinction between humans and machines as actants because actor-network theory is too wrapped up in how actants relate to each other in the network. Are we really indistinct from machines? Do machines have agency?

Bingham, N., (1996). Object-ions: from technological determinism towards geographies of relations.  Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. 14,635-57.

Graham, S.,   (1998). The end of geography or the explosion of place? Conceptualizing space, place, and information technology. Progress in Human Geography. 168-85.

Harraway, D., (1991). A manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. Harraway, D. (ed.) 149-81.

Latour, B., (1993). We have never been modern. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Pile, S., and Thrift, N. (1996). Mapping the subject.  In Mapping the Subject: Geographies of Cultural transformation. Pile, S., and Thrift, N. (eds.) London: Routledge, 13-51.

Thrift, N. (1996). New urban eras and old technological fears: reconfiguring the goodwill of electronic things. Urban Studies. 33, 1463-93.