French sociologist and philosopher Bruno Latour is one of those people. His actor-network theory is about everything being connected in a network, even dead things or non-conscious beings. You’re a part of a network of nature, in which physical objects network with you, and you network with them. This may sound like nonsense – how can one network with something which is incapable of communicating – but there is actually a lot of sense to the actor-network theory. Latour believes that it is the connections in themselves which are important. In other words, it is the way that you and the object enter into the network that it is important to focus on.
If we look at objects in a room, with a person, the actor-network theory starts to make sense. A person is in a bedroom where he lies down on the bed, while staring at his reflection in one of the mirror doors on the wardrobe. By now the person has already interacted with three other things in the network – the bed, the mirror, the wardrobe.
In a Granovetter sense the bed is a strong connection, (because the person laid down on it). The same goes for the mirror
(because the person interacts directly with it); while the wardrobe is a weak connection, which the person is connected to only via the mirror. But the mirrors wouldn’t have been there in the first place if it hadn’t been for the wardrobe, so in this way the weak connection to the wardrobe is important anyway. I wrote that the person in the example had interacted with three objects in the network called a bedroom. Some would probably object, because interaction usually means that both parties of an interaction are taking conscious action.
But the actor-network theory says it’s the function of the bed which makes the interaction. What the bed contributes to the network is the ability to be laid down upon – softly. It isn’t the person that gives the bed softness, but rather the bed which gives softness to the person, when he or she lies down on it. In this way the meeting between the person and the bed enters into a new situation: The person lying down is no longer the same as before he or she laid down, or at least he or she is in a new condition. This new condition has been created by the bed’s function and the person’s willingness to use this function. The question is whether it’s solely the will of the person who uses the bed as a tool to create a new condition, or if the bed itself
contributes to the interaction. In the actor-network theory the latter is the case.
This all may come off sounding like a homespun philosophy born from too much red wine one late night. But that which comes out of this kind of thinking is highly relevant. It is the connections between the things that are the interesting part, not the things in themselves. When one starts to look at the world in this way, the actor-network theory becomes a way of introducing normative notions to Network Society. All of a sudden Network Society becomes a place where one can discuss morals and the philosophies of existence.
An interesting example is the old discussion of gun control. Is it right to ban guns because they are dangerous in themselves, or is it – as is the point of those in favor of liberal gun laws in the U.S. – the people that do the killing, not the guns? In the actor-network theory this discussion would be viewed from the connection between gun and human. It is the connection between the two which creates the problem, not the weapon or the human separately.
From an actor-network theoretical viewpoint, a gun cannot be wrong, neither can a person. But the network connection between the two may easily be wrong – and this can lay the base for a discussion of prohibitive measures.
In an interview from 1996 when Mad Cow Disease tore through Europe as a result of feeding cattle food made from crushed bone marrow, Bruno Latour said:
“But people know very well how to act morally or how to be a realist. The questions lie in the connections and controversies surrounding morality, and when you start to pass judgment, you must switch over to objects, conditions and coincidences. Why should grazers not eat bone marrow? Well, now we know why.”
In other words, the morals of Homo Conexus are not an absolute standard, according to Bruno Latour, but rather relative to the network connection. There’s no use in trying to force ethics like religious dogma on Homo Conexus. Partly because there is always a skeptical alternative within reach, and partly because two networks that are only linked by a weak Granovetter
connection, may have fundamentally different moral concepts at two different points in time.
With this statement Latour breaks away from some of the most basic philosophical thoughts of the European tradition. The fundamental moral principles are constantly under pressure from the many different situations the ever-changing network subjects the people of the network to. Or more down to earth: Because Homo Conexus incessantly creates network connections to people, animals, and things, it is impossible to maintain moral principles that stand the test of every situation. Instead. Latour has it that moral resources are present in every point in the network, but that the stream of information makes morals more relative to the situation.
Morals are being decentralized just like everything else in Network Society. There is no longer a fixed set of moral rules, but the relation between the things in the network are under constant moral evaluation. To take guns as an example again:
Can the network relations between a hunter, a rifle and a deer be subject to the same set of moral rules as a gang member, a sawed-off shotgun and a victim? Bruno Latour finds that this is difficult, nearly impossible. Instead he thinks that the individual moral resources in every point in the network, may lend a
collective image of the morals of society, albeit in constant flux –
precisely as is the case with identities and network connections in the world of Homo Conexus.
Latour also suggests that Homo Conexus isn’t compatible with the political processes of Industrial Society. He points to the connecting of a person and an object as something that makes the situation different from when the person and the object were separate. Both become something else when they are
connected, and therefore we need to think morally about the two as connected and not judge morally on them as separates:
“This is why the discussion between gun control proponents and the others is so interesting, because the left-leaning liberals definition of what human subjects do is just as bad as their opponents’. A human subject becomes something else when it uses the weapon, because it has changed and the weapon has also changed.”
As in the example of the softness of the bed, it is impossible to speak of morals unless we look at the specific connections of the network at the specified time. This is also why it doesn’t make sense to speak of the economy of free (Chapter Nine), since it is based on a left wing, dogmatic set of values, where it
automatically generates social currency to give things away, and where collectivism is the same as social equality. But these dogmas belong to Industrial Society.
If one is to find the morals of Homo Conexus, it is necessary to start with the decentralized society, which doesn’t have these dogmas. Latour puts it this way, once again speaking of the BSE epidemic of the mid-1990s:
“Should cows stop eating grass, should they go back to only eating grass, should we stop eating cows, should we raise more cattle, etc.? This morality is distributed within the objects
themselves, the same way we, in science know how to achieve truth in the classic sense by letting the whole distribution of lab scientists and non-human objects connect. Morality is a path, a way to relate things to each other, so that none of them are treated merely as a means to an end.”
Towards the end of the quote, Latour touches upon the moral side of the new solidarity mentioned in Chapter Five.
The new solidarity may well be a merchant’s solidarity based on the exchange of favors and social content – but there is also an unethical way of exchanging services. There is simply a limit to how much one can use the solidarity to one’s own advantage. In Chapter Five I covered how philosopher René Descartes’s division of identity into subject and object, became fundamental to the identity formation of people from the Renaissance to this day when the subject is no longer at the center, (another
example of decentralization). Latour’s actor-network philosophy is on the same page. Descartes’s division into subject/object isn’t being dissolved, but rather altered and updated.
There is still a difference in subjects perceiving objects, but there is a decentralization taking place which equalizes the value of subjects and objects in the formation of an identity or world view.
It isn’t that Bruno Latour, like Kleinrock, believes that all items will have an IP address in the future, and thereby enough intelligence that we as humans can communicate with them in the network:
“The actor-network theory is not a position that extends subjectivity to objects, and it never has been. Relations are mixed up in many, very complex, philosophical ways between humans and non-humans, and this has been going on since the dawn of man…so it should be apparent that actor network theory is not trying to make the non-human human. It is the study of the ways the two sides have always been integrated.”
Latour rather has it, that we have to relate to subjects and objects without preference for one or the other, in order to shape the heterarchic image of the world, which matches Network Society:
“As Whitehead often says, we are not human subjects all the time. We sleep, we engage in routines, and to an extent we are technological forms of reflex actions. Thousands of entities, types of entities form our existence temporarily, our subjectivity cannot be described as being subjective. So what is really
interesting…is placing yourself somewhere other than the traditional subject-object position.”
So what have we learned about Homo Conexus, and the way this new type of human enters into society? Well, we have learned that Homo Conexus has an insatiable need for
decentralization, with the purpose of giving oneself more network joints with which to network. We have learned that it’s a small world that can be perceived as a big network with a maximum of six degrees of separation between every person in it.
We have learned that hubs are incredibly important elements in the network, as Homo Conexus develops his identity, and sees the possibilities for action that come with an expansion of the network.
We have learned that weak connections are as important as strong ones, because these are the ones that are really the path to new self-development.
We have noted how some philosophers see a change these days, in the classical perception of a person being a subject that experiences the world as a series of objects and other subjects.
And that this change means breaking away from definitive truths and ethics, replaced by situational morals dependent on the relations in the network. A fair share of heavy content.
Now, let’s get ourselves into something a little more cheerful and entertaining – Homo Conexus’s use of media.
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