Network personal notes

Important for my project:
Latour claims that classical sociology has an orientation to participants because the sociologist has metalanguage to the communities language. Latour's relationist sociology, following Machiavelli, avoids this abstract reductionist: "it has no fixed reference frames, and consequently no metalangauge. It expects the actors to understand what they are and what it is" (qtd Spinuzzi 82).

"researchers might consider what net work--and in particular multiplicity--might mean for characterizing the data collected in a case study" (204)..."research participants should be allowed to define the events and genres involved in their work...they should be able to determine how to locally adapt their work...and tell their own stories with their own definitions and scales" (205).

networks involve:
1) people from different function areas collaborating in networks
2) texts or genres that are in relation to the needs of particular, localized work
3) assemblages, all the materials that comprise the network, which are linked in complex and shifting way, and are responsible for extending and developing the network
4) genres = typified rhetorical responses to recurring social situations

network in actor-network theory = interested in how power works; assemblages of humans and nonhumans (seen as political and rhetorical; has turned more toward the term rhizome)

rhizome = diverse, heterogeneous acts and materials that cannot and should not be categorized, placed in subject-object distinctions, or other-wise separated to generate strong explanations of their workings

network in activity theory = interested in how people work; linked activity systems, the nodes that constitute and transcend the humans and nonhumans who participate in them (develop & change, cultural & historical; has turned into knotworking or netWORKing)

despite disagreement, Spinuzzi reaches statsis on the following points:
1) networks are heterogeneous
2) multiply linked
3) transformative
4) black-boxed

Disruption 1 demonstrates both how networks are conceived, but also how networks are used to create rhetorical appeals (complain in a required note to demonstrate to management improper division of labor)

Marx "organic" = same material is progressively transformed

networks claim to power is that they transform systems so that anything outside the network does not matter, even though the size of network is relatively small.

So even Telecorp's physical network consisted of many copresent, overlapping, spliced networks controlled by various companies. The technical, organizational, disciplinary, political and economic complexity of the system was black-boxed or hidden behind a simple interface (Latour, 1987); customers just saw the 'phone company.' The black box was maintained through thousands of daily, localized often ad hoc connections, including genres such as checklists, electronic notes, and immense stacks of marked and highlited printouts" (39)

Texts in networks:
1) are inscriptions
2) belong to genre
3) function as boundary objects

Workers, according to Spinuzzi, must become rhetors, or savvy users of argument and persuasion, because they will encounter endless moments of necessary rhetorical knowledge and use.