I was thinking about this and it made me think of another Latour quote from my Latour book of choice (you know the name).

The problem is that social scientists too often alternate between hubris – each of them dream to be the Newton of social science as well as teh Lenin of social change – or desperation-they despise themselves for merely piling on more reports, stories, and statistics that no one will read. But the choice between complete mastery and total irrelevance is a very superficial one. To despiar of one’s own written text doesn’t make any more sense than the head of a chemistry laboratory to want to be relevant to the NIH. Relevance, like everything else, is an achievement. A report is interesting or not depending on the amount of work done to interest, that is, to place it between other things.

The quote goes on to talk about why the social sciences are important but this part of the quote is relevant to what I wanted to say. There’s another amazing quote on research needing to be revolutionary but it basically says the same thing that the above does. We, and by we I mean most people producing something, seem to struggle constantly with improvement, betterment, relevance, and the all-important “making money”. It isn’t just improvement, most times, but “revolutionary” improvement. I have to wonder if, and I keep coming at this from such a tremendous amount of angles, the point Latour constantly tries to make is that we shouldn’t worry about relevance or improvement in the “revolutionary” sense.

For an “idea factory” I wonder if it wouldn’t be entertaining to create an assignment where one doesn’t attempt this, but tries to figure out how to make something without trying to improve it in the “revolutionary” way. Perhaps the distinction is too fine to really get across quickly. I feel like I need to head back to Simon Ferrari’s journal and post this comment there as well.

Once you’ve done the observation, you have to distill it further – c.f. the inscription stages mentioned in the first quote. If you don’t do that distillation, you’re unlikely to have “a swift transition from craft work to ideas”; but if you don’t do a good enough job of observing, then people will “undercut[] the ‘facticity’ of [your] statement … by drawing attention to the (mere) processes of literary inscription which make the fact possible”. Or, worse yet, if you don’t do a good job but do fail in a way that goes along with others’ biases, people won’t undercut the facticity of your statement even though they should!

That’s useful to keep in mind when running the workshop – I think that, when doing the sorts of blog posts that riff on an author in the context of, say, agile software development, I spend a lot of time making links between what the author says and theories that I already have about software development. Which probably serves a useful role in terms of getting my feet wet, but I shouldn’t stop there, I need to go further and see if I can come up with ideas about how my theories might be wrong. And we should make sure to focus enough on observations in the workshop to have a chance of generating new theories there, too. (Which, I suppose, is why we’re labeling the workshop as an Idea Factory!)

This was the entire goal of Reassembling the Social, to remind us that Sociology is supposed to take time and that we have a huge hand in creating and labeling the social world. Not taking our time, not being mindful, relying on shorthands for knowledge leads to dangerous behavior. As for editing, I don’t know that being an editor is as important as knowing how to write what you’re seeing (also a goal of Reassembling the Social). Being a great writer takes almost as much patience as being a great observer.

Editing out certain associations is probably inevitable but those associations should at least appear somewhere. But how do we determine which associations are worth mentioning? Here is where bias carefully comes in to this sort of thing. Each and every game produced probably has some effect (however small) on the games that come after it (from the same company or not) and not selecting some associations might end up being important when those associations create a controversy later that can be studied.

Of course, i’m talking Sociology whereas you’re talking about the bizarre interdisciplinary world of Latour so I would imagine some of these fine points are mingling for me whereas they’ve been long resolved for you.

Maybe that’s a good lens for my recent A3 obsession, too: A3 reports can represent relatively stable facts, but the A3 book is all about the process of creating the A3 report, not the outcome, and in particular is about the many relationships (between people and people, between people and things, between things and things) that are involved in that process. And the A3 report itself serves as a reminder of the work that gets into it, but by its stripped down nature you can’t pretend that it’s anything more than a reminder and a summary.

Hmm, now I go up and reread what you actually wrote. I think I’m riffing on “be mindful of the data we are producing”, but I have a harder time with “take great pains to record all associations that the data we produce creates”. There are so many associations that I don’t see how we can avoid taking an editorial role here. Maybe that’s the word “network”? It’s not “Actor-Undifferentiated Smear Theory. :-)

I think this point is probably the most central and repeated thing Latour talks about (albeit he does this through a variety of modes and approaches). For the most part, it seems to me that he (Latour) wants us all to slow down and be mindful of the data we are producing and take great pains to record all associations that the data we produce creates. The history of facts is often so difficult to ascertain that it could be called feudal. And, looking back, it is difficult to see the ideas that stood contrary to that fact as it was being created (take the examples of the bakelite, bicycle, and whatever else the ANT/SCOT folks love to talk about). It is here that I wish most discussion of ANT would start.

Speaking of creation of facts and relating them to video games, I was talking about with a friend of mine who researchers consumer needs with computers that they don’t know how to ask for was the difference between the video games when they first came out and video games now that try and emulate a video game / board game hybrid or try to be interactive movies. The consumer of video games doesn’t know what they want any more than the creators seem to be able to figure out what they want.

It’s such an odd thing to see when you think about some of the first games. They were The Video Game. Market deluge created a negative stereotype that hasn’t ever really been washed away despite any success gaming might have had. From here, it almost seems like gamers and game makers went off and created their own business while ignoring the rest of the world. Only recently has this begun to change.

At some point, it seems like makers decided that their consumers wanted better graphics yet resolution seems more of a combination of television resolution quality than that of games themselves). Was it a logical step that video games took when they decided to become more graphic intensive while not really changing input or design that often? I think an ANT discussion should start there when thinking about craft work to ideas.