- Author
- Year
- 2020
- host editors
-
A. Blok
I. Farías
C. Roberts - Title
- What happens to ANT, and its emphasis on the socio-material grounding of the social, in digital sociology?
- Book title
- The Routledge Companion to Actor-Network Theory
- Pages (from-to)
- 345-356
- Publisher
- London: Routledge
- ISBN
- 9781138084728
- ISBN (electronic)
- 9781315111667
- Series
- Routledge companions
- Document type
- Chapter
- Faculty
- Faculty of Humanities (FGw)
- Institute
- Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA)
- Abstract
-
Data-intensive platform media bring up, but also reconfigure the question of the socio-material grounding of the social. This chapter explores how recent engagements with platforms and digital sociology do more than just vindicate ANT’s outlook of a flat socio-material account of the social without inbuilt levels of ‘micro’ and ‘macro.’ It argues that social media platforms reconfigure who or what can count as an actor, what counts as social and what as material, and renders these ambivalences a question of method. In a case study of tweets in the run-up to the Brexit vote, this paper engages with the increasing automation of social life through bots, software-enabled activity and cross-syndication services, and inquires into the specific socio-material constitution of the social in platform media and the limits their infrastructures put on ANT’s foundational principle of ‘follow the actor.’ If the socio-material accomplishment is increasingly obfuscated, platform-based methodologies may involve different, unexpected and more difficult manoeuvres than straightforward acts of following.
- URL
- go to publisher's site
- Language
- English
- Persistent Identifier
- https://hdl.handle.net/11245.1/bc4ede87-29ab-4f42-af56-97a981d169be
Disclaimer/Complaints regulations
If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library, or send a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible.