Where are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts

Paper: "Where are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts" by Bruno Latour. Link:
www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/50-MISSING-MASSES-GB.pdf

Intro: People are free to interpret the precise meaning of an artifact, but they can’t simply tell an automobile engine that it should get 100 miles per gallon. The laws of nature and the capacities of a particular design limit the ways in which artifacts can be integrated into a sociotechnical system. In this chapter, one of the foremost  contrib-utors to the actor network approach, Bruno Latour, explores how artifacts can be deliberately designed to both replace human action and constrain and shape the actions of other humans. His study demonstrates how people can ‘‘act at a distance’’ through the technol-ogies they create and implement and how, from a user’s perspective, a technology can ap-pear to determine or compel certain actions.

Notes:

1. "There is a problem with doors", the writing style of Latour is clever and engaging, reading this paper is quite an experience in itself, so I will only add my first 5 notes here as it'd be quite a challenge to capture the depth of his ideas in a short list. Just read it.
2. "Every time you want to know what a nonhuman (an object) does, simply imagine what other humans or other nonhumans would have to do were this character not present. This imaginary substitution exactly sizes up the role, or function, of this little character.
3. "A profound temporal shift takes place when nonhumans are appealed to; time is folded"
4. "Prescription is the moral and ethical dimension of mechanisms... We have been able to delegate to nonhumans not only force as we have known it for centuries but also values, duties and ethics"
5. "How can the prescriptions encoded in the mechanism be brought out in words? By replacing them by strings of sentences (often in the imperative) that are uttered (silently and continuously) by the mechanisms for the benefit of those who are mechanized: do this, do that, behave this way, don't go that way, you may do so, be allowed to go there... Another way of hearing what the machines silently did and said are the accidents"