group task - 3 or 4 people.

define social media, give examples.

"There is no such thing as Society"

Bruno Latour (2005) _Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory_, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

The use of the term 'social' has become commonplace and pejorative - somewhat emptied of meaning especially where communications technologies are concerned (eg. so-called 'social networking platforms'). It is only vaguely defined at best.  

Although from a quite different starting point, Bruno Latour investigates the use of the adjective 'social'. He is thinking how, in social science, it is assumed to 'designate a stabilized state of affairs, a bundle of ties that, later, may be mobilized to account for some other phenomena' (2005: 1) - an 'assemblage' in other words. 

By returning to the first principles of sociology (the science of living together, and its Latin etymological root 'socius' meaning 'someone following someone else', a 'follower', an 'associate', 2005: 108), Latour proposes to examine what is assembled within society (literally _Reassembling the Social_ as the book title confirms). 

A problem arises, as a consequence of expansions in science and technology, such that the 'social seems to be diluted everywhere and yet nowhere in particular' (2005: 2). It is not that there is no such thing as society (as Thatcher famously put it) but there is a problem in regarding it as a given homogenous thing. 

Rather, it is possible to designate it as a 'tracing of associations' of heterogeneous elements, according to Latour (2005: 5). It is not a thing but a type of connection, an assemblage. This come close to the position of Gabriel Tarde of maintaining that 'the social was not a special domain of reality but a principle of connections' (2005: 13). 

In striving for a more 'relativist' definition of the social and drawing upon the 'uncertainty principle' (where the observer cannot be disentangled from the observed), Latour tries to develop 'uncertainties' over key concepts: the nature of group formations, actions by multiple agents, objects demonstrating agency, as well as ongoing disputes over the nature of facts and the truth claims of social science (2005: 22). The uncertainties do not represent confusion but an opening up of the performative dimension of the social. 

This comes close to action in as much as action is understood as a coming together of complex, diverse, and interlinking agencies locked into uncertain relations. This is the 'actor-network' that describes not a source of action but a 'moving target of a vast array of entities swarming toward it'. He explains that it is never clear who is acting (like the actor on the stage who is never alone but part of a larger apparatus), like play-acting where it is unclear what is authentic, and 'dislocated' in the sense that it is 'borrowed, distributed, suggested, influenced, dominated, betrayed, translated' (2005: 46). It is forever unclear who and what is making the action (like a puppeteer who does not have, or does not believe they have, absolute control over the puppet, and it is unclear who is pulling the strings, 2005: 59). Indeed, other agencies are participants in action (participant-observers) that produce new fluid (liquid) associations that reflect networks (2005: 65). 

By 'network', he is referring to the older ambiguous description of interconnected points informed both by a sociology of organisation but also information technology (as in the work of Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 1996). The difficulty is, as with the term 'social', the term network has become so pervasive that it loses its meaning - that 'worknet' helps to resolve in identifying the 'work' involved in establishing 'net-works' (2005: 132). The term worknet helps to establish the action involved in the interconnections of 'net' and 'work' to stress the movement and flow between agencies. Thus, social action cannot be simply reduced to the material infrastructure that determines social relations (as with classical Marxism, 2005: 84) unless the action of objects is also part of a collective network-performance of connections. 

marxist view: mode of production -> focus on social relations to highlight where exploitation takes place. social relations not stratightforward in the social factory and where agency is complex (machinic). 

Objects have become things again, as Latour puts it: 'the disputed topic of a virtual assembly' (2005: 119; the principle that informed the exhibition _Making Things Public_, at ZKM in 2005, co-curated with Peter Weibel). Together, it is these interconnections of uncertainties that define the social.

politics:
But the social remains elusive. Confusion does not derive from ambiguity but a confusion at the heart of sociology, 'between assembling the body politic and assembling the collective' (2005: 161) - the former associated with the C19th century and the latter with the 21st. It is a well-assembled collective able to perform political functions that remains elusive. The social is reassembled, for Latour, in the possibility of a shared and common definition that renews what it means to be part of the same collective - 'where participants explicitly engage in the reassembling of the collective' (2005: 247) - based on an understanding of the assemblages themselves. This is important, because: 'If there is no society, _then no politics is possible_' (2005: 250). 
Questions remain as to what to collect and the composition of the assembled collectives and this is fundamentally part of the reassembling of the social as an ongoing critical process enmeshed with politics.