Terrie Lynn Thompson discussed her paper, Who’s taming who? Tensions between people and technologies in cyberspace communities. She used Actor Network Theory (ANT) for her work, especially through the work of Latour and John Law. Networked include people, objects, ideas, and practices. From this perspective, she studied numerous participants, such as people, blogs, and even the delete button. She interviewed these objects in her study, both human as well as non-human. I am not entirely clear how she did this (how do you interview a delete button?), though she mentioned this is basically another paper out there and from what I understand, actor network theory is quite complex and not easily explainable to the newbie.
This presentation is clear that I need to read more about actor network theory, as many of the specifics were lost on me (that very same newbie). Terrie seemed quite animated and confident in her work, and this leads me to believe that this research may not be available to a novice (me), without an extensive background in this area.
Small world; Terrie was in one of my presentations on critical human resource development (HRD) several years ago at another conference. Yes, very small world.